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POLITICAL  PROFILES 


[Cecil 


Lord  Grey. 


POLITICAL 
PROFILES 

FROM  BRITISH  PUBLIC  LIFE 


BY 

HERBERT  SIDEBOTHAM 

("A  Student  of  Politics") 


JSoston  mb  IRew  13otft 
HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 

1921 


Printed  in  Great  Britain  by  Hazell,  Watson  &  Viney,  Ld. 
London  and  Aylesbury. 


AUTHOR'S  NOTE 

MOST  of  the  essays  in  this  volume 
have  appeared  serially  in  the 
columns  of  The  Times,  whose 
proprietors  the  author  takes  this  opportunity 
of  thanking  for  their  permission  to  republish. 
Some  additions  have  been  made,  but  only  to 
bridge  the  gulf  between  their  first  appearance 
and  their  present  publication. 

The  essays  on  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  on  Lady 
Astor  and  Captain  Elliot,  and  the  introductory 
and  final  chapters,  are  now  published  for  the 
first  time. 

I  have  to  thank  my  friend,  Mr.  James  Heddle, 
of  Sir  Edward  Hulton's  publications,  for  loans 
of  photographs  and  for  help  in  choosing  them. 


459187 


CONTENTS 


Introductory  :  The   Press  Gallery — Fore 


AND  Aft     .         .         .         . 

11 

I.    Lord  Grey 

83 

II.    The  Cecilians  . 

45 

III.    Sir  Robert  Horne    . 

57 

IV.    Lord  Reading  . 

69 

V.    Mr.  Lloyd  George    . 

79 

VI.    Lord  Curzon    . 

103 

VII.    Mr.  AsQuiTH 

.     115 

VIII.    Mr.  Bonar  Law 

.     127 

IX.    Mr.  Winston  Churchill 

.     141 

X,    Mr.  Chamberlain 

.     153 

XI.    Sir  Gordon  He  wart 

.     165 

XII.    Lady  Astor 

.     175 

XIII.    Mr.  J.  H.  Thomas     . 

.     187 

XIV.    Lord  Birkenhead     . 

.      195 

XV.    Lord  Derby     • 

.     205 

viii  CONTENTS 


PAQH 

XVI.    Mr.  Brace  and  Others  .         .         .215 

XVII.    Lord  Carson 225 

XVIII.    Captain  Elliot       .         .         .         .235 

Postscript  :  The  Future  of  Parliamentary 

Government  ......     245 


THE  PRESS 
GALLERY 


INTRODUCTORY 

THE  PRESS  GALLERY 

THE  author  was  for  some  eighteen  months 
a  representative  of  The  Times  in  the 
Press  Galleries  of  the  Houses  of  Par- 
liament, and  the  studies  that  follow  are  based 
mainly  on  observation  from  these  high  latitudes, 
and  only  in  a  few  instances  from  personal 
acquaintance  with  their  subjects.  It  is  a 
strange  life,  that  of  the  Press  Gallery  of  the 
House  of  Commons,  especially  to  one  entering 
it  after  many  years  spent  behind  the  purdah 
of  the  leader-writer,  and  quite  as  interesting 
as  the  life  of  the  floor  of  the  House  or  of  the 
Terrace.  Distinguished  strangers  in  their 
gallery  must  often  have  noticed  the  row  of  men 
in  the  gallery  opposite  behind  the  Speaker's 
Chair,  each  in  his  little  pew,  and  every  one 
more  oddly  intellectual  in  appearance  than  the 
others.  These  are  the  Press  Gallery  journalists. 
Some  are  seen  to  be  taking  copious  notes,  and 
these  are  the  reporters,  pre-Raphaelite  artists 
whose  business  it  is  to  set  down  exactly  what 
people    say    in    the    debate,    improving     its 

11 


12  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

grammar,  removing  tautology,  and  making 
sense  where  this  is  lacking.  Others  write  very 
little,  but  sit  disdainfully  observant,  and 
these  are  the  impressionists,  who  are  there 
to  make  a  study  of  the  proceedings  for  in- 
dolent readers,  and  are  called  "  sketch- writers." 
The  reporters  work  in  shifts  of  a  quarter  of  an 
hour  at  a  time,  and  the  distinguished  stranger 
opposite  cannot  have  failed  to  notice  the 
new  shift  enter  by  one  or  other  of  the  two 
doors  at  the  back  of  the  gallery,  each  with 
its  liveried  Cerberus,  tap  the  old  shift  on 
the  shoulder,  and  take  his  place.  People  are 
always  coming  and  leaving,  but  the  disdainful 
impressionists  go  out  oftener  than  they  come 
in,  for  their  art  is  that  of  rejection. 

Through  the  doors  there  are  two  anti- chambers 
with  telephone  boxes,  both  leading  into  a  room 
full  of  black  oak  desks,  with  deep  corner  seats 
covered  with  shiny  leather  in  two  corners,  a 
post-office  in  another  corner,  and  doors  every- 
where. Here  there  is  always  a  buzz  of 
voices  comparing  notes  of  the  speeches,  and 
checking  doubtful  passages ;  here,  if  a  quota- 
tion has  been  made  from  the  Latin  classics 
(which  happens  about  once  a  session),  the 
passer-by  who  has  been  to  Oxford  is  asked 
to  verify  and  translate,  and  made  to  feel  for  a 
brief  moment  that  the  money  his  father  spent 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  13 

on  his  education  was  after  all  not  all  waste. 
There  are  other  similar  rooms  on  the  same  floor, 
one  of  which  is  reserved  to  The  Times,  a 
privilege  jealously  guarded  and  greatly  envied. 
Everywhere  else  the  passer-by  can  overhear 
resumes  of  the  proceedings  being  shouted  over 
telephones  to  various  newspapers  ;  there  is  the 
scurry  of  newsagency  boys  carrying  messages, 
the  shuffling  of  ancient  retainers,  and  the  litter 
of  copying  blacks  and  other  advanced  journalis- 
tic technique.  Except  through  the  one  private 
room  of  The  Times  there  is  a  right  of  way 
everywhere,  and  there  is  incessant  going  and 
coming ;  it  is  half  street,  half  office.  A  dis- 
dainful one  fresh  from  tea  will  stop  and  ask 
someone  coming  out,  Who's  up  ?  What 
did  he  say  ?  Or,  How  did  the  House  take 
that?  And,  being  answered,  as  he  always  is, 
civilly,  will  go  back  to  more  tea  or  forward 
to  more  debate,  according  to  his  judgment. 
There  are  two  upstairs  floors  also  belonging  to 
the  Press  Gallery,  containing  reading  and 
writing  rooms,  a  dining-room,  news-rooms, 
a  library,  and  three  other  rooms.  One  of 
these  is  a  tea-bar,  famous  because  tea  is  the 
drink  of  the  intellectual,  and  because  you  go 
through  it  to  get  to  the  House  of  Lords  or 
the  Committee  Rooms  or  the  Lobbies.  There 
is  another  bar,  where  towards  the  end  of  the 


14  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

evening  conversation  is  brilliant,  or  merely- 
ponderous,  and  political  reputations  are  made 
and  unmade  three  times  an  hour.  And  there 
is  a  room  called,  for  some  reason,  the  boudoir, 
which  is  inhabited  by  people  whose  writing  is 
so  bad  that  they,  out  of  love  for  their  fellow- 
men,  use  typewriters.  These  unhappy  but 
mostly  deserving  men  sit  herded  into  a  small 
room  far  away  from  everyone,  and  when  they 
are  all  in  the  throes  of  composition,  the  noise 
is  like  that  of  an  Oldham  spinning  mill.  The 
theory  is  that  while  one  who  uses  a  pen  must 
be  protected  from  the  noise  of  a  typewriter, 
the  people  who  use  typewriters  love  each  other's 
noise.     So  hard  is  the  way  of  the  altruist. 

In  this  strange  world  journalists  are  by 
themselves,  though  a  vagrant  Member  of 
Parliament,  if  his  manners  are  good,  occasionally 
penetrates.  You  find  your  way  about  it 
by  walking  corkscrew  fashion,  turning  as 
often  as  possible  to  the  left  if  you  are  going 
upstairs,  and  to  the  right  if  you  are  coming 
down.  They  are  a  very  happy  family,  and 
surely  there  is  no  place  in  the  world  where 
there  is  so  much  jostling  of  helpful  and 
amiable  understanding,  for  there  is  no  room  for 
jealousy  amongst  men  who  do  so  much  writing 
that  they  have  no  time  for  reading,  least  of  all 
what  their  friends  write.     Some  are  paid  by 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  15 

quantity,  and  these  by  dint  of  hard  work  that 
a  nigger  blackleg  would  scorn  are  alleged  to 
make   large    sums    of   money.     Others    never 
seem  to  work  at  all,  having  acquired  a  wonder- 
ful technique  that  enables  them  to  turn  out  a 
column  while  you  turn  your  back.      Others 
unhappily  bite  the  ends  of  their  penholders,  or 
indulge  in  rallentandos    and   long  pauses   on 
their  typewriters   in  search  of  the  just  and 
exact  word.     Everywhere  is  a  high  if  some- 
what cynical  conscientiousness.     No  writing  to 
speak  of  is  done  in  the  House  itself.     To  know 
when  to  be  in  the  House  and  when  it  is  safe  to 
be  out  of  it  requires  a  strategic  sense,  which,  if 
they  were  generals,  would  win  them  an  earl- 
dom ;    but    occasionally    there    are    "  break- 
throughs "  of  debate,  which  make  pie  of  every- 
thing that  has  been  written  earlier,  and  if  this 
takes  place  late  at  night  you  get  scenes  of 
indescribable   valour,    and    your   languid   im- 
pressionist becomes  a  Brigadier- General  Carey. 
If  only  these  men  could  write  what  they  think 
and  say,  what  wonderful  documents  newspapers 
would  be.     Alas,  all  newspapers — well,  nearly 
all — ^write  down  to  the  level  of  propaganda. 
But  there  is  no  such  blight,  thank  goodness, 
on  the  opinions  of  newspaper  men  that  are 
not  pubhshed.     The   pen    is   sworn,   but  the 
mind  remains  unsworn,  behind  those  swinging 


16  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

doors  and  up  those  crooked  staircases.  Every 
night  hundreds  of  little  babies  of  political 
thought  are  murdered  because  they  are  born 
out  of  party  wedlock,  and  may  not  come  down 
to  a  respectable  family  breakfast. 

There  is  yet  a  third  class  of  Parliamentary 
journalists,  known  as  the  Lobby  men.  The 
business  of  these  people  is  to  get  political  news, 
and  with  this  object  they  hang  about  the 
Lobbies,  waylaying  Members  as  they  emerge 
from  the  House  or  just  as  often  being  waylaid 
by  them,  seeking  explanations  from  Ministers, 
trying  to  take  everyone's  temperature,  endur- 
ing long  and  suffering  all  things,  publicly 
evaded,  secretly  courted.  There  is  a  high 
standard  of  professional  honour  amongst  these 
men.  The  surest  way  to  have  a  secret  kept  is 
to  impart  it  to  them  in  confidence;  the  surest 
way  to  have  it  published  is  to  refuse  confidence. 
Every  political  sin  will  be  forgiven  by  these 
men  but  deception  or  attempted  deception. 
They  wear  for  the  most  part  a  sad  and  anxious 
look,  and  make  an  outward  show  of  deep 
suspicion  towards  each  other's  enterprise,  but 
in  fact  work  in  rings  in  which  the  information 
obtained  by  any  member  is  at  the  service  of  all 
the  other  partners.  Only  one  of  these  Lobby 
men  is  known  to  be  a  Conservative,  and  the 
job  seems  to  dye  everyone's  mind  to  one  of  the 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  17 


many  shades  of  Liberalism.  But,  like  the 
gallery  men,  they  have  a  wonderful  knack  of 
separating  their  private  and  their  ex- officio 
opinions.  Who  shall  paragraph  the  para- 
graphists  ? 

But  to  return  to  the  House.  It  fills  up  three 
times  a  day.  The  first  time  is  for  questions, 
which,  from  their  miscellaneous  character, 
always  yield  topics  of  interest.  These  last 
from  a  quarter  to  three  to  a  quarter  to  four, 
and  are  followed  by  questions  of  which  private 
notice  has  been  given  to  a  Minister.  These 
frequently  relate  to  the  more  urgent  political 
matters  of  the  hour,  and  Ministers  who  have  a 
definite  statement  that  they  wish  to  make 
usually  take  this  opportunity.  Questions  over, 
you  hear  a  voice  crying  in  the  Lobbies  outside, 
"  Orders  of  the  Day,"  but  unless  some  new  Bill 
or  other  important  question  is  coming  on 
immediately,  the  voice  is  the  signal  for  Members 
who  are  in  to  troop  out,  not  for  those  who  are 
out  to  come  in.  A  House  of  fifty  or  sixty  is 
not  noticeably  thin.  If  an  important  speaker 
is  up.  Members  will  come  in,  for  all  the  smoke- 
rooms  and  reading-rooms  have  what  is  called 
an  indicator,  giving  the  name  of  the  speaker. 
Three-fourths  of  the  Members  who  vote  in  the 
average  division  have  not  heard  a  word  of  the 
debate,  but  in  many  cases  the  arguments  used 
2 


18  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

are  only  hotted  up  from  the  committee-room 
debates,  and  everything  that  can  be  said  for 
or  against  is  famihar.  The  hardest  work  of 
Members  (it  may  be  here  observed)  is  done  in 
committee  upstairs,  which  means  in  one  or 
other  of  the  rooms  off  the  long  corridor  which 
journalists  reach  by  way  of  the  tea-room. 
By  six  the  House  fills  up  again,  for  it  is  in  the 
hour  before  dinner  that  Ministers  and  other 
important  speakers  usually  rise.  The  House 
does  not  adjourn  for  dinner,  but  sits  continu- 
ously, and  the  hours  between  half-past  seven 
and  nine,  when  the  benches  are  nearly  empty, 
is  the  time  when  new  and  shy  Members,  if  they 
are  wise,  get  used  to  the  sound  of  their  voices  in 
the  House.  At  half-past  nine  the  House  fills 
up  again,  and  often,  if  the  debate  is  a  live  one, 
the  best  speaking  of  the  day  is  heard  now, 
for  sensibility  is  keenest  after  a  wise  dinner. 
At  eleven,  in  normal  conditions,  the  House 
rises.  The  cry  "Who  goes  home?"  echoes 
through  the  Lobbies,  traditional  from  the  days 
when  it  was  safer  to  have  company  in  the 
streets  at  night. 

In  appearance  the  House  of  Commons  is^very 
like  a  medium-sized  panelled  Nonconformist 
chapel,  with  the  Speaker's  Chair  at  the  east 
end  opposite  the  door,  which  opens  out  on  to 
the  Members'  Lobby,  a  large  round   hall   into 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  19 

which,  from  the  Press  Gallery,  you  can  just 
see  through  the  glass  doors.  Some  twelve  feet 
in  from  the  door  there  is  a  brass  plate  across 
the  carpet  which  is  known  as  the  Bar,  and  marks 
the  boundary  of  the  floor  of  the  House.  Be- 
tween the  Bar  and  the  door  you  are  technically 
not  in  the  House,  and  may  stand  about  listen- 
ing, but  not  officially  visible  to  the  Speaker; 
but  when  you  have  crossed  the  Bar  you  must 
make  your  way  to  your  seat,  bowing  in  the 
direction  of  the  Speaker,  not  to  him,  but  to  the 
altar  of  St,  Stephen's,  which  once  stood  where 
his  chair  is.  There  is  a  wide  centre  aisle  lead- 
ing to  the  Table,  which  is  in  front  of  the 
Speaker's  Chair.  The  green  carpet  of  the 
room  is  over  a  grated  floor,  through  which 
fresh  air,  drawn  in  from  the  river,  and  cleansed 
of  its  microbes  and  of  its  life  at  the  same  time, 
ascends  into  the  chamber.  When  they  are 
searching  the  cellars  below  for  Guy  Fawkes 
or  Sinn  Fein,  or  replacing  the  cotton-wool 
through  which  the  air  is  passed,  you  can  see  the 
lights  moving  about  through  the  carpet.  The 
artificial  lighting  is  from  thick  glass  in  the 
ceiling,  and  by  reason  of  its  yellow  quality 
simulates  dayhght  well.  The  benches  are 
green  like  the  carpet,  and  at  night,  when  the 
dark  red  curtains  are  drawn,  the  chamber  looks 
very  cosy. 


20  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

These  details,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  are  not  too 
trivial  for  chronicling  about  so  great  a  room,  and 
they  are  set  down  here  because  it  is  just  the 
things  that  are  very  familiar  that  usually  escape 
being  told  to  those  who  have  never  seen  them. 
The  benches  run  lengthwise  to  the  chamber, 
and  are  divided  into  four  blocks  by  a  narrow 
transept  called  the  gangway ;  and  it  may  help 
those  who  do  not  know  the  House  to  forma  better 
idea  of  its  debates  to  describe  the  topography 
of  the  various  party  and  personal  groupings. 
(Those  who  know  all  about  it  may  be  advised 
to  skip  a  few  pages.)  Three  out  of  the  four 
blocks  are  occupied  mainly  by  the  Government 
and  its  supporters.  Immediately  to  the  right  of 
the  Speaker's  Chair  is  the  Front  Ministerial 
Bench,  where  sit  the  members  of  the  Govern- 
ment, or  as  many  of  them  as  there  is  room  for 
or  as  want  to  be  in  the  House.  The  one  who  is 
speaking  usually  moves  towards  the  middle 
of  the  bench  so  as  to  be  opposite  the  box  at  the 
end  of  the  table,  and  have  something  to  thump 
out  his  arguments  on.  It  is  one  of  the  privileges 
of  Ministers  (and  also  of  the  Front  Opposition 
bench  opposite)  to  put  their  feet  up  on  the 
table,  but  when  their  legs  are  short  they  have 
to  get  their  shoulders  well  down  to  reach  it, 
giving  the  impression  of  men  trying  to  stand 
on  their  heads.     It  is  curious  to  watch  the 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  21 

various  mannerisms  of  Ministers  listening  to 
criticism.  Mr.  Lloyd  George  shows  by  his  face 
and  an  affirmative  nod  or  negative  shake  of  the 
head  what  is  passing  through  his  mind — the 
clouds  and  sunshine  chase  across  his  face ;  Mr. 
Churchill  will  often  lean  forward  with  his  elbows 
on  his  knees,  make  paper  triangles,  and  twirl 
them  round  industriously  on  his  joined  thumbs. 
Sir  Gordon  Hewart  sits  Sphinx-like  and  expres- 
sionless ;  Mr.  Bonar  Law  used  to  show  that  he 
was  paying  attention  by  opening  his  eyes 
wider;  Sir  Eric  Geddes  by  lifting  up  a  leg  and 
nursing  it.  No  reputation  ever  stands  still 
there.  Mr.  Chamberlain's,  despite  his  mastery 
of  Parliamentary  form  and  style,  has  dropped 
since  he  became  leader  of  the  House,  Sir  Gordon 
Hewart's  has  risen,  and  he  is  now  the  hope  of 
those  who  work  for  the  return  of  the  Liberal 
Independents,  and  by  some  is  being  thought  of 
as  a  possible  leader.  Sir  Eric  Geddes,  after  a 
long  period  of  depreciation,  is  beginning  to  be 
valued  as  the  time  comes  for  him  to  leave 
political  life.  Mr.  Cecil  Harmsworth,  who 
always  sits  at  the  end  of  the  Front  Bench, 
manages  to  be  both  discreet  and  well  liked  as 
Under-Secretary  for  Foreign  Affairs,  and  from 
the  same  bench  you  may  hear  the  even  mezzo 
forte  common  sense  of  Sir  Robert  Home,  the 
graceful   argument   of  Mr.    Stanley   Baldwin, 


22  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

his  successor  at  the  Board  of  Trade,  the  defiant 
and  official  sforzando — somewhat  too  dry  and 
stiff  for  his  years — of  Sir  Philip  Graeme,  and 
the  staccato  syncopation  of  Commander  Hilton 
Young.  Nor  should  one  forget  Sir  Hamar 
Greenwood  on  his  day,  with  his  thunderous 
insistence  on  the  expletively  obvious,  playing 
his  Irish  nocturnes  (this  rut  of  musical  meta- 
phore  is  hard  to  get  out  of)  like  a  muscular 
collier  wrestling  with  the  Battle  of  Prague. 

Behind  the  Front  Bench  are  Sir  John  Rees,  a 
Liberal  Coalitionist,  who  devotes  an  eighteenth- 
century  elegance  of  diction  to  the  service  of 
mid- Victorian  reaction ;  Sir  Philip  Sassoon, 
Private  Secretary  of  the  Prime  Minister, 
caricatured  by  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  as  a  Jewish 
Buddha,  squatting  silent  and  wise ;  Mr. 
Ormsby-Gore,  a  son-in-law  of  the  Marquis  of 
Salisbury,  a  Cecilian  with  the  fire  of  energy 
and  ambition  in  him,  rising  rapidly  in  esteem 
and  effectiveness  ;  and  those  twin  Coalitionists, 
the  Liberal  Captain  Coote,  cold  as  beseems  a 
Balliol  man,  but  incisive  and  independent  of 
mind,  and  the  so-called  Conservative  Captain 
Elliot,  bubbling  with  energy  and  pullulating 
with  ideas  ;  Mr.  Leng-Sturrock,  amiably 
cynical ;  Sir  Henry  Craik,  plaintively  Tory, 
Here,  too,  before  he  moved  over  to  the  Liberal 
benches.  Lord  Robert  Cecil  used  to  sit. 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  23 

Across  the  gangway  on  the  same  side  of  the 
House  are  several  interesting  groups.     On  the 
middle  bench  sit  the  Ulster  Members  (Lord 
Carson  no  longer  with  them),  the  Protestant 
virtue  sticking  out  of  them  like  a  hedgehog's 
spines ;    on    the    front    bench    the    Workers' 
League,     a     labour     party     with     its     claws 
drawn ;     and   on  the  back  row  the  Cecilian 
group,  open-eyed  and  progressive  Conservatives. 
From  this   block  usually   speaks   Mr.   Austin 
Hopkinson.     Son  of  a  Chancery  barrister,  who 
is    ex- Vice- Chancellor    of  Manchester  Univer- 
sity, Mr.  Hopkinson  distinguished  himself  in 
the  war  both  as  an  officer  and  a  private.     He 
had  already  attained  quite  remarkable  success 
in  business  when  he  enlisted  as  a  private,  and 
he  has  evolved  in  Parliament  a  new  philosophy 
of  the  relations  of  capital  and  labour.     The 
duty  of  the  capitalist,  in  his  view,  is  to   live 
on  as  little  and  to  work  as  hard  and  as  skilfully 
as  he  can.     His  idea  of  the  capitalist-priest, 
taking  vows  of  poverty,  in  order  to  give  his  men 
an  example  of  efficiency,  has  repelled  more  than 
it  has  attracted,  but  is  far  more  amiable  than 
the   stock   caricature   of  the   capitalist   as    a 
grossly  fat  man  with  a  monstrous  cigar  in  the 
corner    of    his    mouth.     He    speaks    with    an 
elegant  diction  and  a  somewhat  affected  and 
mincing  manner ;    he  never  quite  agrees  with 


24  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

anybody  else  ;   but  he  is  one  of  the  men  in  this 
Parhament  who  will  be  heard  of  again. 

It  is  the  fashion  to  decry  the  Parliament  of 

1918,   but  in  truth  it  has  some  virtues  that 

previous   Houses   had   not.     Its   opinions   are 

fluid,  and  it  is  as  susceptible  to  a  powerful 

piece  of  rhetoric  as  a  young  man  to  beauty. 

When  one  of  the  good  men  are  speaking,  you 

can  see  its  opinions  changing  like  the  sea  under 

the  shadow  of  a  cloud,  or  at  the  shudder  of  an 

approaching  wind.     With  all  its  faults  it  holds 

up  the  mirror  to  the  moods  of  the  nation,  and 

in  the  present  state  of  the  country  its  open  and 

pliable  mind  is  far  more  serviceable  than  the 

frozen  trench  warfare  of  fixed  principles. 

We  cross  the  floor  of  the  House  to  its  third 
quarter,  below  the  gangway  on  the  Speaker's 
left.  Here  are  the  remnant  of  the  Old  Irish 
Nationalist  Party,  Mr.  O'Connor,  Mr.  Devlin, 
Major  Redmond,  and  Mr.  McVeagh  ;  a  phalanx 
of  big  business  men ;  and  on  the  front  row 
the  anti-wasters.  These  last,  who  are  such 
sirens  in  the  constituencies,  cut  a  very  poor 
figure  in  Parliament,  and  they  have  never  been 
able  to  meet  the  spenders  on  equal  terms. 
The  best  of  them  is  the  youngest,  Mr.  Esmond 
Harmsworth,  who  is  really  a  mid- Victorian 
Radical ;  and  will  probably  do  well  with  more 
experience.     But    no    party    can    live    on    a 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  25 

negation.  Mr.  Bottomley  speaks  as  well  as 
Mr.  Asquith,  and  with  a  great  deal  of  his 
reticence  and  sonority,  but  his  political  ideas 
get  all  their  leaven  from  human  ignorance 
and  folly,  and  his  cynicism  is  sometimes 
unpleasant.  The  Irishmen,  on  the  other  hand, 
have  faith  in  the  ideal  and  the  gift  of  rhetoric, 
which  starts  tears  to  the  eyes  and  passionate 
longing  to  be  on  the  side  of  men  who  can  lose 
so  eloquently.  But  the  old  bouquet  that  they 
raise  for  us  to  smell  has  lost  its  fragrance,  and 
the  canker  of  disappointment  has  devoured  its 
petals.  How  bitterly  liberty  has  mocked  their 
efforts — 

Forth  sprang  the  impassioned  queen  her  lord  to  clasp  I 

Again  that  consummation  she  essayed  ; 
But  the  unsubstantial  form  eludes  her  grasp 
As  often  as  that  eager  grasp  was  made. 
The  phantom  parts — ^but  parts  to  reunite 
And  reassume  its  place  before  her  sight. 

The  fourth  quarter  of  the  Benches  includes 
the  Independent  Liberals  and  the  Labour 
men.  Most  conspicuous  among  them,  and  in 
some  ways  the  most  remarkable  figure  in  the 
Opposition,  is  Commander  Kenworthy,  who 
sits  at  the  end  of  the  second  row.  Next  to  the 
Prime  Minister  and  the  law  officers,  he  works 
harder  than  anyone  in  the  House.  He  is 
reputed  to  have  a  staff  of  secretaries  whom  he 


26  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

keeps  busy  reading  for  him  and  working  up 
subjects,  and  his  interests  are  as  extensive  as 
they  are  detailed.  He  came  into  fame  as  a 
rationaliser  of  the  Russian  revolution  and  as  a 
bitter  enemy  of  our  interference  with  Bolshevism 
in  Eastern  Europe;  and  the  secret  mental 
sympathy  which  sprang  up  between  him  and 
the  Prime  Minister  at  that  time  has  never 
withered  since.  He  speaks  fluently  but  not 
very  well,  for  he  lacks  the  art  of  persuasion,  and 
he  dissipates  his  activities  over  too  wide  a  range 
of  subjects.  But  he  has  a  thick  skin,  courage, 
immense  industry,  and  an  unmistakable  flair, 
and  his  services  to  the  Opposition  have  been 
invaluable.  He  will  hold  office  some  day — 
the  navy,  one  of  the  subjects  on  which  he 
speaks  with  authority,  might  find  him  oppor- 
tunity for  useful  constructive  work.  An 
orthodox  Liberal  he  is  not,  and  his  develop- 
ment, one  suspects,  will  be  towards  a  new 
Radicalism,  and  later  in  life  towards  Toryism. 
His  neighbour  in  the  House,  and  friend.  Colonel 
Wedgwood,  is  a  dissatisfied  Liberal  who 
nominally  belongs  to  the  Labour  Party,  but 
remains  a  Liberal  still,  for  a  Liberal  creed  is 
capable  of  almost  indefinite  extension  to  the 
left.  He  is  the  frankest  speaker  in  the  House, 
and  a  man  of  brilliant  apercus  usually  conveyed 
in  asides  rather  than  on  the  main  current  of  his 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  27 

argument.  Other  men  in  this  quarter  of  the 
House  are  Captain  W.  Wedgwood  Benn,  a 
sincere  Liberal,  who  marshals  his  facts  well, 
but  whose  exposition  of  principles  suffers  some- 
times from  the  entanglement  of  his  coat-tails  ; 
Mr.  George  Lambert,  one  of  the  few  whole- 
hearted Liberal  individualists  left,  and  a  very- 
trenchant  speaker ;  Sir  Donald  Maclean, 
looking  his  part  as  Liberal  leader,  sincere  if 
somewhat  conventional  in  his  Liberal  instinct, 
and  at  times  tending  to  the  forcible- feeble ; 
General  Seely,  gallant  leader  of  forlorn  hopes  ; 
Mr.  Hogge,  who,  with  Mr.  John  Wallace,  has 
latterly  played  the  part  of  liaison  officer  between 
the  Coalition  and  Independent  Liberal  wings. 
But  in  so  short  a  chapter  one  must  avoid  the 
sin  of  cataloguing. 

To  sit  above  the  Speaker's  Chair  for  eighteen 
months  and  to  overlook  the  wonderful  game 
below,  to  see  so  many  men  working  for  justice 
as  they  conceive  it,  to  feel  one's  sympathies 
borne  now  this  way  now  that  on  the  strong 
currents  of  argument,  and  to  realise  how  much 
more  goes  to  the  making  of  politics  than  mere 
intellectual  ability,  or  even  moral  conviction — 
there  is  no  such  cure  for  the  despair  that  so 
easily  overcomes  the  student  of  politics  groping 
amongst  ideas  in  the  solitude  of  his  room,  or  for 
the  flippancy  towards  the  workers  in  politics 


28  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

which  is  so  common  amongst  clever  theorists 
who  take  care  to  avoid  the  dust  and  heat  of  the 
work-room.  On  the  other  hand,  to  sit  and 
watch  for  twenty  years  as  some  have  done 
would  be  to  become  a  dungeon  of  Parlia- 
mentary learning,  and  to  acquire  such  an 
awe  before  the  workings  of  this  greatest  of 
political  institutions  that  criticism  would 
become  almost  an  irreverence.  And  that  must 
be  the  writer's  excuse  for  writing  on  Parlia- 
mentary figures  from  the  fullness  of  new 
acquaintance  before  the  freshness  of  impres- 
sions becomes  blurred  and  the  freedom  of  an 
observer  becomes  mortgaged  to  respect. 

He  has  several  times  been  asked  by  old 
gallerymen  what  is  the  dominant  impression 
that  he  gets  of  the  House  coming  fresh  to  it,  or 
what  is  the  scene  that  lingers  most  in  his 
memory,  or  what  is  the  best  speech  that  he  has 
heard.  The  dominant  impression  is  one  of  the 
amazing  sincerity,  if  not  of  politics,  at  any  rate  of 
the  average  Members  of  the  House  of  Commons. 
The  scene  that  still  lingers  from  first  experience 
is  the  banging  of  the  doors  of  the  Chamber 
when  Blackrod,  the  House  of  Lords  messenger, 
approaches  with  a  summons  to  hear  the  Royal 
assent  given  to  a  Bill,  and  knocks  three 
times  at  the  door  for  admittance.  It  is  a 
vivid  reminder  of  the  past,  when  the  Commons 


THE    PRESS    GALLERY  29 

had  to  fight  for  its  powers  against  an  arrogant 
and  sometimes  even  violent  Executive.  The 
three  best  speeches  in  the  time  he  has  been  there 
were  undoubtedly  the  Prime  Minister's  on 
Ireland  in  December  1920,  Mr.  Churchill's 
speech  defending  the  Government  for  its 
punishment  of  General  Dyer  for  his  share  in 
the  Amritsar  outrages,  and  Lord  Sumner's 
speech  on  the  same  subject,  but  on  the  other 
side,  in  the  House  of  Lords.  The  first  was  a 
wonderful  example  of  imaginative  poise  and 
balance,  the  second  of.  skill  in  the  handling 
and  conversion  of  opposition,  and  the  third 
of  the  power  of  intellectualism,  hard,  cold, 
and  uninspired. 


LORD  GREY 
OF  FALLODON 


LORD  GREY  OF  FALLODON 

ALL  Lord  Grey's  political  life  has  been 
the  expression  not  of  ambitions  nor 
even  of  views  so  much  as  of  character. 
His  is  a  type  of  character  happily  not  un- 
common in  England,  especially  amongst  the 
lesser  nobility  from  which  he  sprang,  but  it 
eludes  description,  as  very  smooth,  regular 
features  defy  caricature.  Its  distinction  lies  in 
the  avoidance  of  saliences  and  eccentricities 
whether  of  expression,  of  thought,  or  of 
emotion ;  in  being  the  hero  of  no  story  and 
the  author  of  no  epigram  ;  in  a  reserve  that 
is  too  proud  to  be  vain,  too  shy  to  be  arrogant. 
Some  men  gain  their  place  in  politics  by  their 
power  of  understanding  other  people,  others 
by  making  it  necessary  for  others  to  under- 
stand them,  and  Lord  Grey  is  amongst  these 
last.  He  has  never  been  anything  but  himself ; 
he  yields  nothing  to  the  mood  of  his  audience 
and  is  apparently  indifferent  to  its  applause  ; 
outwardly  calm  and  self-contained,  he  never 
strains  a  subject  or  the  attention  of  his  listeners, 
3  33 


34  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

but  maintains  both  on  the  same  even  high  level 
of  seriousness. 

Men  of  this  temperament  have  always  com- 
manded great  influence  in  counsel,  especially 
when,    as    in    Lord    Grey's    case,    there    is 
obvious  ability  without  the  suspicion  of  clever- 
ness.    For  in  politics  cleverness  is  always  a 
danger  signal,  and  often  substitutes  dissent  for 
conviction,  even  at  the  moment  when  it  seems 
to  be  most  effective.     In  this  disarming  sug- 
gestion  of  the   plain   man,   taking   his   day's 
work  as  it  comes  and  dealing  with  difficulties 
as  they  arise,  each  on  its  merits  and  without 
reference  to  theories  or  formulae,  Lord  Grey  is 
more  like  the  late  Duke  of  Devonshire  than 
anyone  else  in  our  politics.     There  is  probably 
more  art  in  his  persuasiveness  than  appears, 
but  it  is  not  that  of  studied  effects,  but  rather 
the  product  of   long  hours  of  half-conscious 
cerebration.     He  rarely  makes  a  composition 
of  his   speeches   beforehand,    but,   like   every 
fly-fisher,  he  is  fond  of  solitude,  and  it  was 
perhaps  at  these  moments  that  he  acquired 
the  art  of  thinking  aloud  persuasively,  which  is 
their    distinguishing    quality.     On    the    other 
hand,  some  of  his  speeches,  notably  that  on 
the  Monday  before  the  war,  one  on  arbitration 
with  the  United  States  made  in  1911,  and  the 
more  recent  speech  on  the  Government's  Home 


LORD    GREY    OF    FALLODON  35 

Rule  Bill  in  the  Lords,  have  been  fine  examples 
of  set  oratory,  all  the  more  impressive  from 
their  complete  lack  of  ornament.  But  excellent 
as  they  are  in  arrangement,  and  carried  through 
on  an  even  level  of  seriousness,  his  speeches 
owe  their  power  mainly  to  the  impression  of 
high  character  and  plain,  sincere  thinking. 

Lord  Grey  gave  few  indications  of  greatness 
before  the  revival  of  Liberalism  which  began 
after  the  Boer  War.  At  Winchester  and 
Balliol  he  was  serious  without  priggishness,  but 
also  without  distinction,  except  at  tennis,  and 
no  prophecy  of  Jowett's  is  reported  about  him, 
like  those  about  Asquith  and  Lansdowne.  His 
first  acquaintance  with  affairs  was  gained  as 
private  secretary  to  Sir  Evelyn  Baring  (as  he 
then  was),  in  Egypt,  but  no  quality  has  been 
attributed  to  his  work  at  this  time  but  that  of 
even  competence,  and  he  would  doubtfully 
have  obtained  the  post  of  Under-Secretary  in 
the  Liberal  Government  of  1892-1895  but  for 
the  influence  of  Lord  Rosebery.  Already  the 
cleavage  in  the  Liberal  Party  was  evident, 
which  later  was  to  go  so  deep,  for  Gladstone 
at  this  time  was  prepared  to  discuss  the 
evacuation  of  Egypt  but  for  the  resistance  and, 
indeed,  the  veto  of  Lord  Rosebery,  and  the 
Under-Secretary  was  on  the  side  of  his  Foreign 
Office    chief    and    against    the    Gladstonian 


POLITICAL  PROFILES 


impulse.  It  was  Grey,  again,  who,  as  Under- 
Secretary,  gave  the  warning  to  France  about 
the  Nile  which  later  became  the  stock  quotation 
on  our  side  of  the  Fashoda  controversy.  And 
Grey  was  the  strongest  member  of  the  Liberal 
League  triumvirate  which  sought  to  combat 
what  it  regarded  as  the  excesses  of  the  anti- 
Imperial  reaction  in  the  Liberal  Party  in  the 
decade  round  the  turn  of  the  century.  He 
refused  to  oppose  the  reconquest  of  the  Sudan, 
believed  in  the  future  of  British  East  Africa, 
supported  the  policy  of  the  South  African 
War,  and  dissociated  himself  from  the  rancour 
of  Liberal  criticism  on  the  moribund  Chamber- 
lain-Balfour  Ministry.  Yet  he  was  never  a 
sterile  Whig,  for  his  views  on  Labour  policy 
were  frequently  advanced  (in  this  respect  he 
was  like  Lord  Haldane,  another  of  the 
triumvirs),  and  though  he  had  some  reserves 
on  Gladstonian  Home  Rule,  he  was  always 
loyal  to  the  Irish  National  demands.  But  on 
foreign  and  Imperial  policy  he  not  merely 
disagreed  with  the  policy  of  the  numerical 
majority  of  his  party,  but  regarded  it  with 
alarm.  When  the  Liberal  Government  of  1906 
was  being  formed,  he  refused  the  Foreign  Office 
unless  Sir  Henry  Campbell-Bannerman,  against 
whom  the  Liberal  Leaguers  had  been  in  revolt, 
went  to  the  Lords,  and  it  was  with  the  greatest 


LORD    GREY    OF    FALLODON  87 

difficulty  that  he  was  induced  to  waive  this 
condition.  There  is  a  vein  of  stubbornness 
in  his  nature  which  on  matters  of  importance 
indisposes  him  to  compromise. 

These  facts  need  to  be  remembered  if  we 
are  justly  to  estimate  the  quality  of  his  conduct 
of  foreign  affairs  in  the  eight  years  before  the 
war.  The  election  of  1906,  except  to  the 
limited  extent  to  which  the  relative  merits  of 
Free  Trade  and  Protection  were  the  issue,  was 
almost  as  heavy  a  defeat  for  the  Liberal 
Leaguers  as  for  the  Conservatives,  and  the  new 
Foreign  Secretary  entered  on  his  work  knowing 
that  the  sentiment  of  the  majority  in  his  party 
was  out  of  sympathy  with  his  views.  Already, 
while  the  General  Election  was  still  in  progress, 
he  had  begun  those  conversations  with  France 
which  led  inevitably  to  our  Alliance  in  the  late 
war,  and  there  can  be  little  doubt  that,  had 
their  meaning  and  implications  been  under- 
stood, the  whole  policy  would  at  that  time 
have  been  repudiated  by  the  vast  majority  of 
Liberals— to  their  bitter  regret  later.  Never 
has  a  Foreign  Secretary  been  confronted  with 
problems  so  grave  as  Sir  Edward  Grey's  in 
these  years,  and  never  amid  domestic  circum- 
stances of  such  difficulty  and  delicacy. 
Throughout  the  whole  of  this  period  there  was 
a  powerful  opposition  within  the  party,  and  on 


38  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

that  fateful  Monday  before  the  war  when 
Grey,  for  the  first  time,  laid  the  whole  facts 
before  the  country,  he  could  hope,  but  could 
not  know  for  certain,  that  he  would  carry  the 
House  with  him.  There  is  probably  not 
another  man  in  politics  who,  in  these  circum- 
stances, could  have  kept  on  an  even  keel  all 
through  these  years,  have  avoided  the  innumer- 
able temptations  to  political  dishonesty,  and 
steadily  improved  his  moral  influence  all  the 
time.  In  1906  little  more  than  a  name,  in 
1914  he  wielded  a  moral  sway  such  as  hardly 
another  Foreign  Secretary  has  ever  done. 
With  every  one  of  his  enemies — ^and  he  had 
many — ransacking  everything  that  he  said 
about  our  relations  with  Germany,  none  ever 
succeeded  in  putting  his  hand  on  a  single 
sentence  and  saying,  "  There  you  deceived  us." 
The  most  they  could  ever  say  with  truth  was  : 
"  You  did  not  tell  us  all."  It  will  always  be 
one  of  the  most  interesting  speculations  in 
politics  how  the  event  would  have  shaped 
itself  if  he  had. 

Lord  Grey  derived  much  strength  from  the 
extreme  candour  with  which  he  always  stated 
his  views  on  the  relations  between  party 
politics  and  foreign  policy.  He  was  one  of  the 
earliest  advocates  of  the  continuity  of  foreign 
policy,   and   on   taking   office   he   avowed   his 


LORD    GREY    OF    FALLODON  39 

intention  of  continuing  the  foreign  policy  of 
Lord  Lansdowne.  There  is  no  hard-and-fast 
distinction  between  home  and  foreign  affairs, 
as  the  events  of  the  last  seven  years  have 
proved,  and  that  being  so,  it  is  a  hard  saying, 
without  qualification,  that  a  Liberal  foreign 
policy  is  the  same  as  a  Conservative,  and  the 
other  way  about.  What  Lord  Grey  meant 
was  that,  inasmuch  as  its  risks  are  enormous, 
and  are  carried  by  the  whole  nation,  foreign 
policy  should  be  a  national  policy  fused  of 
Liberal  and  Conservative  traditions.  In  fact, 
throughout  the  whole  of  his  period  as  Foreign 
Secretary  he  was  a  Coalition  Minister  in  a 
Liberal  Government,  and  he  missed  no  oppor- 
tunity of  making  that  clear.  What  he  con- 
cealed was  never  the  ends  but  only  the  means 
of  policy,  but  even  this  degree  of  concealment 
has  to  this  day  made  him  an  object  of  some 
suspicion  to  Liberals  of  a  certain  type.  His 
defence  would  be  that  public  diplomacy  means 
frankness  as  to  objects  and  principles  of 
foreign  policy,  and  can  never  mean  that  all  its 
conversations  must  be  held  in  the  street  within 
earshot  of  anyone  who  cares  to  listen.  The 
steady  growth  in  his  reputation  for  singleness 
of  mind  is  proof,  if  proof  were  needed,  that 
coalition  need  not  mean  doubleness  of  policy 
unless  there  is  a  doubleness  of  mind. 


40  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Lord  Grey  is  sensitively  humane,  and  the 
cruelty  and  strain  of  the  war  affected  him 
perhaps  more  than  most.  His  object  in 
developing  the  Entente  with  France,  and  con- 
cluding the  peace  with  Russia,  was  to  ensure 
the  peace  of  the  world,  and  the  outbreak  of  the 
war  was  a  bitter  disappointment  of  his  hopes. 
His  second  hope,  that  the  war  would  be  short, 
was  disappointed  too,  and  the  accusation, 
frequently  made  abroad,  that  he  was  respon- 
sible for  the  war  cut  him  like  a  knife.  The 
very  bitterest  German  cartoon  in  the  whole 
war  was  one  that  depicted  him  as  Dorian 
Grey,  standing  as  he  might  have  done  at  the 
top  of  the  Foreign  Office  staircase  and  survey- 
ing a  hideous  portrait  of  himself  dripping  with 
blood.  For  a  time  it  looked  as  though  the 
cruelty  of  war  and  his  partial  blindness  had 
broken  him  for  politics.  But  peace  has 
brought  him  back  into  politics  with  restored 
sight  and  health,  and  with  perhaps  the  first 
real  ambition  he  has  yet  entertained  in  his 
life — namely,  to  do  solid  and  enduring  work  for 
the  peace  of  the  world.  The  tribulation  of  the 
war  has  removed  some  of  the  old  limitations  of 
temperament  without  changing  his  views.  He 
still,  as  in  1911,  holds  to  his  belief  in  the  friend- 
ship of  England  and  America  as  the  key  to  the 
future  of  the  world.     He  still  repudiates  the 


LORD    GREY    OF    FALLODON  41 

old  doctrine  which  Salisbury  and  the  stronger 
wing  of  the  Liberal  Party  held  of  splendid 
isolation,  and  now,  as  in  1906,  he  believes  that 
we  must  have  firm  and  constant  friends  in 
Europe,  and  that  of  these  the  friendship  of 
France  is  the  most  necessary  and  the  most 
fertile  of  beneficence.  But  he  has  found  in 
the  League  of  Nations  a  new  instrument,  and 
a  translation  into  the  practical  forms  of  legis- 
lation of  the  old  aspirations  of  the  Concert  of 
Europe  which  so  fascinated  Gladstone.  He 
has  repudiated  the  idea  of  coalition,  but  that 
is  a  matter  of  phrasing  rather  than  of  sub- 
stance. By  coalition  he  understands  a  loose 
amalgam  of  inconsistent  political  ideas  ;  by 
party  government  he  means  a  college  of  men 
with  common  ideas  of  policy,  but  not  neces- 
sarily of  men  all  drawn  from  one  party,  for 
that,  if  it  were  desirable,  is  not  possible  so  far 
as  we  can  see  ahead.  To  this  work  he  brings 
not  genius  or  impressionism,  but  faith  and 
simplicity  of  mind. 


THE  CECILIANS 


Lord  Robert  Cecil  and  Mr.  A.  J.  Balfour. 


[L.N.  A. 


II 

THE   CECILIANS 

MR.  BALFOUR,  now  floridly  benign,  a 
rich  oracular  voice  issuing  forth  from 
the  obscurer  recesses  of  the  Coalition ; 
Lord  Robert  Cecil,  a  Hamlet  in  politics,  noble 
of  sentiment  and  frail  of  purpose  ;  Lord  Hugh, 
Mercutio  in  a  cowl,  intellectually  athletic  on 
a  diet  of  dilemmas  ;  Mr.  Ormsby-Gore,  still 
looking  like  an  Eton  boy,  full  of  gentleness 
and  good  sense ;  as  First,  Second,  and  Third 
Gentlemen,  the  trenchant  Lord  Winterton,  Mr. 
Walter  Guinness  the  frank,  and  Mr.  Edward 
Wood  the  earnest,  not  forgetting  Lord  Wolmer, 
though  one  seldom  sees  him,  and,  of  course, 
the  Marquess  of  Salisbury,  carrying  but  hardly 
wielding  the  sword  of  his  great  name.  These 
are  the  Cecilians.  Besides  Mr.  Wood,  Under- 
Secretary  of  the  Colonies,  only  one,  Mr. 
Balfour,  sits  on  the  Front  Bench,  but  wherever 
they  sit  the  Cecilians  have  their  minds  at 
any  rate  on  the  Front  Bench.  They  were 
born  to  the  Ministry,  whether  they  get  there 
or  not. 

For  a  generation  before  the  war  they  had 

45 


46  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

been  fighting  a  losing  battle.  It  was  they  and 
their  kind  who  had  to  do  most  of  the  fighting 
with  Gladstone,  and  they  survived  the  frontal 
attacks  of  the  Liberals  only  to  be  outflanked 
and  ousted  from  power  by  their  ex-Radical 
janissaries.  They  still  hold  out  in  a  corner  of 
the  stricken  field,  strongly  entrenched  in  the 
old  hall  garden,  but  Mr.  Balfour,  one  fears,  was 
the  last  of  the  hereditary  rulers  of  the  Con- 
servative Party.  Ought  one  to  fear,  or  rather 
to  rejoice,  over  it?  There  is  room  for  both 
sentiments.  It  would  be  a  grave  matter  if  the 
great  political  virtues  that  one  associates  with 
the  Cecilians  were  lost  to  the  party  by  reason  of 
their  faults  ;  on  the  other  hand,  one  wonders, 
after  all,  whether  these  virtues  will  not  have  a 
better  chance  when  their  owners  have  to  fight 
for  their  decisions  instead  of  promulgating 
them. 

For  twenty  years  before  the  war  there  was 
hardly  an  enthusiasm  in  politics  that  did  not 
find  its  enemies  in  the  Cecils.  Irish  Home 
Rule,  Tariff  Reform,  Imperial  Federation, 
nearly  every  suggestion  for  organic  change  has 
withered  alike  under  their  sympathy  and  their 
opposition  ;  every  passion  and  nearly  every 
hope  in  politics  owes  them  a  grudge,  none  the 
less  deep  because  their  criticism  has  often  been 
wise  and  justified  by  the  event.     Isolated  on  a 


THE   CECILIANS  47 

pinnacle  of  I  told  you  so,  it  is  nothing  to  be 
surprised  at  that  their  influence  in  the  party 
should  have  sunk  so  low.  But  Cecilians  who 
could  construct  as  well  as  they  criticise,  attack 
as  skilfully  as  they  retire,  find  as  many  good 
reasons  for  doing  something  as  for  doing  nothing 
in  particular,  might  again  be  a  great  power 
in  politics,  and  it  may  be  that  the  final 
overthrow  of  the  legitimist  dynasty  in  the 
party  will  contribute  to  this  change  of  their 
nature. 

From  Mr.  Balfour  nothing  is  to  be  hoped. 
He  does  not  seriously  believe  in  politics  as  an 
instrument  of  human  progress  ;  to  him  they 
are  merely  the  art  of  neutralising  forces  and 
engaging  them  in  an  equilibrium  that  is  more  or 
less  stable  so  that  the  really  serious  activities 
of  the  world  may  not  be  interfered  with. 
What  these  are,  may  vary.  For  Mr.  Balfour 
they  are  the  critical  enjoyment  of  the  intellec- 
tual play  of  human  life,  with  himself  in  a 
comfortable  box ;  for  others,  the  making  of 
money  ;  he  himself  has  said  that  what  makes 
most  difference  to  human  happiness  is  science, 
thinking  that,  perhaps,  because  he  knows  so 
little  about  it.  Office  he  loves,  not  for  the 
sake  of  exercising  power,  but  for  the  feeling 
that  it  gives  him  that  he  could  exercise  power 
if  he  chose  to  do  so.     In  fact,  he  no  more 


48  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

influences  the  policy  of  the  Coahtion  than  Jonah 
steered  the  whale. 

Outside  the  Government  his  keen  analytic 
mind  might  have  been  of  inestimable  service  ; 
but  then  he  could  not  have  been  behind  the 
scenes,  where  he  loves  to  be,  and  besides,  if 
there  be  anything  permanent  in  Coalition,  he 
wants  to  be  in  and  to  see  that  no  Curzon  jumps 
a  Cecil  claim.  And  so  he  is  a  sleeping  partner 
in  the  Government,  as  he  was  in  his  own 
Government  when  Mr.  Chamberlain  was  at 
the  height  of  his  power,  but  with  this  differ- 
ence, that  he  is  many  degrees  more  removed 
from  the  throne  of  popular  favour  and  that  in 
the  meantime  most  of  his  party  has  slipped 
away  from  him.  Hard  fate  for  one  who  worked 
so  hard  for  party  unity  as  Mr.  Balfour  has  done, 
and  yet  not  unjust.  He  preferred  the  forms 
of  party  unity  to  the  living  convictions  and 
enthusiasms  that  make  party  real,  and  he  is 
left  clasping  the  unsubstantial  shadow.  The 
most  brilliant  and  the  most  sterile  mind  in 
modern  politics,  he  is  not  the  man  who  can 
breathe  life  into  the  cold  Cecilian  ideals. 

Are  any  of  the  other  Cecilians  in  better 
plight  ?  Conservatism  still  stands  for  the  idea 
of  discipline  in  public  life,  for 

degree,  priority  and  place, 
Insisture,  course,  proportion,  season,  form, 
Office  and  custom  in  all  line  of  order — 


THE   CECILIANS  49 

for  "  that  generous  loyalty  to  rank  and  sex, 
that  proud  submission,  that  dignified  obedience, 
that  subordination  of  the  heart  which  kept 
alive,  even  in  servitude  itself,  the  spirit  of  an 
exalted  freedom,"  and  with  all  Cecilians  con- 
ceptions like  these  are  bred  in  the  bone,  matters 
not  of  argument  but  of  instinct.  Moreover, 
the  sceptical  and  critical  English  mind,  if  it  is 
rarely  found  on  the  summits  of  achievement,  is 
as  precious  as  lime  in  the  valleys  below,  and 
one  cannot  deprive  Conservatism  of  its  habit  of 
scepticism  towards  the  new  and  unknown,  and 
its  acid  analysis  of  enthusiasms  without  its 
being  the  loser.  When  all  is  said  against  the 
Cecils  they  have  always  contributed  these 
gifts  to  politics.  Conservatism  will  not  get 
these  things  from  the  new  Radical  school 
within  the  party.  To  the  newer  school  of 
Conservatism,  the  connection  with  a  Radical 
of  some  sort,  whether  called  Disraeli  or  Cham- 
berlain or  Lloyd  George,  is  life ;  to  the  old 
school  it  is  death.  That  is  the  moral  of  Mr. 
Balfour's  career.  Can  our  modern  Cecils 
remake  Toryism  in  new  forms  ? 

The  chief  hope  is  in  Lord  Robert  Cecil ; 
Lord  Hugh  is  the  abler  man,  but  with  him 
politics  at  best  are  only  the  clamp  of  ordered 
society,  and  the  springs  which  move  its  elabo- 
rate mechanism  are  to  be  found  in  religion 
4 


50  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

alone.  The  age  is  not  really  irreligious,  but  the 
semi-political  forms  of  Lord  Hugh's  religion  do 
not  attract  it,  and  for  all  the  brilliancy  of  his 
intellect  he  is  disqualified  for  leadership.  Lord 
Robert  Cecil  is  in  better  case,  and  less  than  a 
year  ago  he  seemed  marked  out  to  be  the  real 
leader  of  the  Opposition.  He  has  dignity  and 
a  personality ;  he  speaks  well  enough  always, 
and,  when  he  is  moved,  with  eloquence ;  he 
has  character  and  the  broad  humanity  of  his 
class,  something  of  Mr.  Balfour's  dialectical 
skill  combined  with  greater  fertility  of  idea  and 
more  industry.  The  House  thought  much  of 
him,  and  from  the  Labour  benches  in  particular 
he  always  had  an  attentive  and  sympathetic 
hearing.  For  between  Toryism  and  Socialism 
there  is  a  natural  sympathy ;  Mr.  Herbert 
Spencer  used  to  call  Socialism  the  new  Toryism, 
because  both  accepted  the  theory  of  the  omni- 
potent State.  Had  Lord  Robert  Cecil's  thought 
run  into  the  forms  of  Tory  Socialism  he  might 
have  been  assured  of  a  following  in  the  country, 
if  not  in  the  House,  and  Socialism,  which 
suffers  from  the  blight  of  materialism,  would 
have  gained  by  contact  with  his  idealism.  It 
might  also  have  learnt  something  of  the  arts 
of  political  dodgery,  which  the  Cecils  have 
cultivated  not  out  of  badness,  but  by  way  of 
concession  to  a  world  that  they  believe  would 


THE   CECILIANS  51 

not   understand    them    if   they    were    wholly- 
frank. 

But  the  Cecils,  though  some  of  them  believe 
in  an  omnipotent  Church,  have  always  opposed 
the  idea  of  an  omnipotent  State,  and  if  Lord 
Robert  was  ever  under  temptation  to  develop 
in  that  direction,  the  war  would  have  cured 
him  of  it.  He  is  the  keenest  champion  of 
individual  rights,  bitterly  critical  of  bureau- 
cracy, and  anxious  to  contract  the  functions  of 
the  State.  These  intellectual  convictions  were 
deepened  by  the  long  anguish  of  the  war,  and 
when  at  the  end  of  it  there  emerged  the  con- 
ception of  the  League  of  Nations  he  embraced 
it  as  a  new  gospel.  The  League  took  a  place 
in  his  political  philosophy  comparable  to  that 
occupied  by  the  Church  with  Lord  Hugh,  and 
by  Mr.  Balfour's  conception  of  party  as  an 
insurance  policy  in  a  world  full  of  accidents. 
It  fitted  in  perfectly  with  his  humane  tempera- 
ment and  his  political  philosophy.  Why  should 
not  a  Cecil,  repelled  by  the  coarse  enthusiasms 
of  ordinary  politics,  find  in  the  League  a 
diviner  air,  where  perfect  witness  is  in  the  eyes 
of  all- judging  Jove  alone,  and  the  lost  political 
greatness  of  the  family  clothe  itself  in  a 
new  cosmopolitan  purple  ?  An  enemy  of  the 
pretensions  of  the  State  over  the  individual, 
why  should  he  not  seek  to  curb  its  excesses  in 


52  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

international  affairs  too  and  help  to  erect  a 
new  Areopagus  ?  At  last  a  Cecil  was  enthu- 
siastic and  even  atune  with  the  spirit  of  the  age. 
Anything  seemed  possible. 

These  hopes  that  were  formed  of  Lord 
Robert  have  not  been  realised,  and  the  reason 
is  that  he  cannot  fight.  Something  always  gets 
in  the  way,  when  there  is  something  to  be  done 
as  well  as  said,  either  consideration  for  his 
party,  or  the  dislike  that  all  his  class  have  of  a 
scene,  or  an  instinctive  Oxford  repugnance  for 
extremes,  or  it  may  be  a  temperamental  reluct- 
ance to  hurt  anyone's  feelings.  He  suffers 
from  the  fatal  defect  in  rough-and-tumble 
politics  of  always  seeing  the  strength  of  the 
argument  against  him,  and  he  can  no  more 
stand  up  to  the  Prime  Minister  in  a  contro- 
versy than  he  could  box  with  a  dinosaur.  It 
is  not  cowardice,  but  the  intellectual  fascina- 
tion that  the  arguments  of  the  other  side  have 
over  him.  When  he  makes  a  speech  he  cannot 
keep  them  out. 

"  I  don't  know,"  "  Well,  they  may  be  right," 
"  I  don't  wish  to  dogmatise,"  "  I  may  be 
wrong,"  and  with  each  successive  phrase  of 
that  kind  the  spirits  of  his  sympathisers  droop 
more  and  more.  He  forgets  that  most  human 
beings  don't  want  to  make  up  their  own  minds, 
but  like  someone  to  do  that  irksome  work  for 


THE   CECILIANS  63 

them.  But  if  he  is  so  respectful  to  his  oppo- 
nents' arguments  when  he  himself  is  stating 
them,  is  it  wonderful  that  when  they  come  like 
fire  from  the  mouth  of  that  redoubtable  dragon 
of  debate,  the  Prime  Minister,  Lord  Robert 
should  be  no  St.  George  ?  Our  Hamlet  solilo- 
quises threateningly,  but  when  the  talk  is  over 
he  rarely  votes  against  the  Government,  let 
alone  sets  out  to  kill  it.  Claudio  and  Gertrude 
still  sit  on  the  throne  of  his  father,  and  if  there 
is  any  killing  by  a  Cecil  the  first  to  perish  will 
be  Polonius,  he  of  the  Foreign  Office. 

But  if  the  Cecilians  have  still  to  learn  the 
work  of  opposition,  they  have  shown  that  they 
can  strike  fire  and  conceive  a  genuine  enthu- 
siasm. Mr.  Balfour's  Zionism  is  something. 
Lord  Robert  Cecil's  advocacy  of  the  League  of 
Nations  and  his  pity  for  the  plight  of  Eastern 
Europe  have  had  power  and  sincerity,  and  his 
humanity  moves  one.  The  younger  men,  too, 
have  done  well  on  Ireland  and  shown  that,  if 
they  cannot  as  yet  execute,  they  can  conceive 
a  problem  in  a  big-hearted  and  generous  way. 
These  are  promising  signs,  and  there  are  still 
the  makings  of  a  new  party,  not  big,  perhaps, 
but  influential  and  distinguished. 

If  all  the  Liberal  Party  were  Asquiths,  there 
would  by  this  time  have  been  an  alliance  between 
them  and  the  Cecilians.     They  have  much  in 


54  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

common — ^their  coldness  and  scepticism,  their 
attachment  to  forms,  their  dislike  of  enthu- 
siasms and  general  ideas,  their  distrust  of 
bureaucracy,  their  views  on  foreign  affairs,  on 
national  economy,  and  on  fiscal  policy.^  Liberals 
are  not  all  Asquiths  and  Greys,  but  when  the 
next  split  comes  amongst  the  Independent 
Liberals — and  that  will  be  as  soon  as  they  are 
more  numerous  —there  will  be  some,  one  fancies, 
who  will  find  their  nearest  friends  in  their  old 
enemies,  the  Cecilians.  For  the  old  party 
divisions  are  breaking  down,  and  in  the  new 
ones  that  are  forming  there  will  be  unexpected 
regroupings. 

1  Since  this  essay  was  written,  Lord  Robert  Cecil  has  crossed 
the  floor  of  the  House  and  now  sits  on  the  Front  Opposition 
Bench,  amongst  the  Independent  Liberals. 


SIR    ROBERT 
HORNE 


Sir  Robert  Horne. 


Ill 

SIR    ROBERT   HORNE 

SIR  ROBERT  HORNE,  forty-nine,  homo 
novissimus,  son  of  a  Scots  parish 
minister,  Grammar  School  boy  (or  its 
Scots  equivalent),  Glasgow  and  Edinburgh 
Universities,  lecturer  in  philosophy  in  the 
University  of  Wales,  and  later  teacher  of 
another  kind  of  philosophy,  and  at  more  profit 
to  himself  as  a  successful  member  of  the  Scots 
Bar,  at  the  National  Service  Ministry  when 
war  came  and  associated  with  Sir  Eric  Geddes 
on  the  Army  railways  in  France  and  at  the 
Admiralty,  Member  of  Parliament  at  the 
Armistice  Election,  Minister  of  Labour  last 
year,  this  year  President  of  the  Board  of 
Trade,  next  year  Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  ^ 
— ^there  never  was  in  politics  quite  so  sudden 
arrival  and  rapid  advancement.  The  English 
Attorney- General  only  eight  years  ago  was 
still  a  junior  on  the  Northern  Circuit,  but  he 
was  interested  in  politics  before  the  law,  and 

1  This  was  written  in  December  1920,  but  the  writer, 
though  he  has  added  some  modern  sentences  to  the  article, 
cannot  bring  himself  to  efface  this  prophecy. 

67 


58  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

even  then  had  a  fair  record  of  poHtical  work 
behind  him.  Sir  Eric  Geddes,  too,  swam 
suddenly  into  the  heavens,  but  as  a  comet 
rather  than  a  fixed  luminary.  Sir  Robert, 
more  fortunate,  has  escaped  attachment  to  an 
orbit  of  expertise  and  is  free  to  range  the  whole 
field  of  politics. 

He  was  certainly  lucky  in  the  moment  of  his 
arrival  in  politics,  when  the  Prime  Minister  was 
on  the  look-out  for  new  men  and  anxious  to 
found  a  new  school  of  administrators.  But 
his  detractors — success  so  rapid  could  not  hope 
to  escape  them — are  wrong  who  say  that  he  is 
only  lucky.  The  secret  of  his  power  is  elusive. 
It  is  not  in  his  speaking,  which  has  a  firm  dis- 
ciplined tread  without  wings  or  seduction, 
strong  in  argument  and  often  racy  in  expres- 
sion, but  no  precipitant  of  emotion.  A 
vibrant  voice,  a  friendly  presence,  and  a  good 
physique  have  helped,  but  alone  could  not 
explain  success  so  remarkable.  He  is  said  to 
be  a  good  administrator,  and  although  one  can 
well  believe  it  in  his  case,  civil  servants  will 
say  that  of  every  political  chief  who  can  sign 
his  name,  and  the  less  he  does  besides  that  the 
more  they  think  it.  Nor,  again,  are  we  to  see 
in  the  last  two  or  three  years  the  sudden  matur- 
ing of  long  years  of  patiently- prepared  plans. 

"  Dinna  be  a  fool,"  his  mother  is  reported  to 


SIR    ROBERT    HORNE  59 

have  replied  when  he  asked  her  opinion  about 
his  taking  office,  "  come  hame."  Sir  Robert 
Home  takes  long  views  and  is  ambitious,  but 
he  is  not  a  cold  or  calculating  man,  nor  yet  is 
he  in  politics  because  he  is  possessed  by  a 
faith  that  will  give  him  no  rest,  or  for  any 
other  reason  than  that  it  is  work  that  he  likes 
and  for  which  his  marked  aptitude  has  taken 
no  one  by  surprise  so  much  as  himself. 

The  characteristics  that  have  embanked 
his  great  natural  abilities  to  success  are,  one 
should  say,  high  animal  spirits,  the  Scottish 
sense  of  noble  adventure,  and  an  irrepressible 
fondness  for  the  stuff  of  human  nature — 
qualities  that  have  never  been  given  the  high 
place  in  the  hierarchy  of  political  virtues  that 
is  their  due.  For  politics  are  full  of  walking 
skeletons  with  labels  attached.  Once  they 
were  men  to  whom  politics  were  the  conflict 
of  human  feelings,  an  enlargement  on  a  great 
scale  of  those  expansions  of  affection,  of  ideas 
and  pleasures  shared,  of  help  given  and  received 
which  make  the  best  part  of  human  life.  But 
someone  came  one  day  and  attached  a  label 
to  them ;  ever  afterwards  they  were  expected 
to  illustrate  what  was  written  on  the  label, 
and  if  they  departed  from  it  they  were  thought 
to  be  men  of  no  principle  ;  and  so  they  became 
mere  lines  in  some  parallelogram  of  forces,  all 


(50  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

principles  and  no  viscera.  One  sees  this  sort 
of  thing  happening  every  day  in  politics,  and 
it  is  because  they  enable  a  man  to  resist  the 
devitalisation  of  principles  that  the  qualities 
characteristic  of  Sir  Robert  Home  have  such 
importance.  He  is  said  to  have  warmed  both 
hands  at  the  fire  of  life  ;  he  has  heard  as  many 
chimes  at  midnight  as  Lord  Gladstone  once 
boasted ;  he  has  been  known  to  work  hard  all 
day  when  in  busy  practice  at  the  Bar  and  to 
dance  hard  all  night. 

He  likes  young  company  for  its  easy  birth 
of  ideas  ;  he  has  still  enough  philosophy  to 
find  perennial  interest  in  new  views,  fresh 
generalisations  of  human  life ;  but  always, 
before  he  accepts  them,  he  likes  to  see  them 
translated  into  the  terms  of  human  nature 
and  action ;  without  this  rich  vein  of  Scottish 
caution  he  could  hardly  have  remained  until 
to-day  that  treasure  of  hostesses,  an  eligible 
dancing  bachelor.  He  has  something  in  com- 
mon both  with  Sir  Robert  Walpole  and  with 
Sir  Henry  Campbell-Bannerman.  He  has  the 
Walpole  gift  of  seeing  every  political  question 
in  the  terms  of  human  nature ;  Walpole's 
coarseness,  which  was  behind  his  age,  has  been 
refined  in  him  to  a  genial  and  realistic  view  of 
affairs  illustrated  from  an  inexhaustible  fund 
of  good  stories ;    his  humanity,   so  much  in 


SIR    ROBERT    HORNE  61 

advance  of  his  age,  has  descended  in  full 
measure.  Again,  without  Bannerman's  Liberal 
faith,  burning  inwardly,  he  has  his  freshness, 
his  straightforwardness,  and  the  bluntness  that 
often  manages  to  be  persuasive  and  even 
coaxing. 

The  actual  achievement  of  Sir  Robert 
Home,  apart  from  his  share  in  the  settlement 
of  industrial  strife,  is  not  great.  But  more 
important  than  the  Legislation  that  comes  from 
a  Department  are  the  daily  and  hourly  inter- 
views which  its  head  has  to  conduct  with  all 
and  sundry,  and  it  is  a  Minister's  handling  of 
these  matters,  far  more  than  the  changes  that 
he  proposes  in  Parliament,  that  makes  the  time 
jarring  or  smooth.  He  had  gained  some  know- 
ledge of  labour  matters  at  the  Admiralty,  and 
doubtless  it  was  his  success  there  during  the 
war,  of  which  the  world  knows  nothing,  that 
took  him  to  the  Ministry  of  Labour  at  the 
peace. 

It  was  a  dangerous  and  critical  time  in  the 
history  of  Labour  politics,  and  a  doctrinaire  or 
a  viewy  man  might  easily  have  brought  about 
a  widespread  conflagration.  Sir  Robert  Home 
was  neither.  He  was  personally  liked  by  the 
Labour  men ;  he  gave  the  impression  of  open- 
mindedness  and  of  one  who  was  piecing  together 
the  parts  of  a  new  and  enlightened  policy  of 


62  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

peace  between  Capital  and  Labour,  and  only 
anxious  to  receive  suggestions  ;  his  newness  to 
politics,  the  fact  that  he  was  a  Conservative, 
and  his  appearance  of  modesty  all  helped  him  ; 
but  he  succeeded  most  of  all,  as  might  be 
expected,  because  he  knew  his  subject  very 
well  and  knew  his  men. 

The  principal  facts  in  Labour  politics  since 
the  Armistice  are  the  series  of  defeats  that 
direct  action,  both  the  theory  and  the  practice, 
has  suffered ;  the  definite  retrogression  of  the 
idea  of  nationalisation  of  industry,  especially 
amongst  the  miners,  where  it  was  strongest, 
and  the  adoption  by  the  miners  of  a  principle, 
capable  of  being  extended  to  other  trades,  that 
wages  must  stand  in  some  relation  to  efficiency 
and  to  output.  In  all  these  changes  of  opinion. 
Sir  Robert  Home  had  a  great  share,  and  his 
task,  never  an  easy  one,  became  very  difficult 
during  the  coal  strike  of  this  year.  The  miners 
suspected  him  of  being  an  owners'  man,  but 
on  the  other  hand,  owners  often  had  cause  to 
know  that  there  was  a  rough  side  to  his  tongue. 
The  blame  for  the  sudden  stoppage  of  control 
over  the  coal  industry,  which  many  thought 
was  responsible  for  the  obstinacy  of  the  strike, 
was  put  on  him ;  and  other  critics  held  that 
he  was  unnecessarily  stubborn  and  uncom- 
promising in  his   opposition  to  the   "  pool." 


SIR    ROBERT    HORNE  63 


But  throughout  he  was  influenced  by  his  views 
of  what  was  necessary  for  the  efficiency  of  the 
industry ;  what  in  his  opinion  would  diminish 
output  could  not  be  for  the  good  of  the 
workers.  So  great  was  the  importance  that 
he  attached  to  an  alhance  between  trade 
unionism  and  industrial  efficiency,  that  he  was 
prepared  to  carry  his  resistance  to  almost  any 
lengths.  He  helped  and  was  helped  by  the 
growth  of  a  moderate  party  amongst  the 
workers ;  most  of  all  he  was  helped  by  the 
state  of  our  national  finance  and  the  facts  of 
our  industrial  position.  The  estimate  that 
will  be  formed  of  Sir  Robert  Home's  conduct 
of  the  dispute  will  depend  very  largely  on 
whether  behind  this  resistance  to  inefficiency 
in  the  mining  industry  is  a  constructive  policy 
of  industrial  reform. 

Sir  Robert  Home  was  born  a  Disraelian 
Conservative,  and  he  is  still  without  any  sort 
of  sympathy  with  the  dogmatic  side  of 
Liberalism.  He  has  no  faith  in  the  extension 
of  State  activity.  The  essence  of  trade  is  that 
it  is  an  adventure  in  which  failures  are  the 
stages  of  progress  as  officers'  graves  are  the 
milestones  of  Empire.  State  ownership  is  bad, 
or  at  best  a  disagreeable  alternative,  because 
it  is  assured  against  the  consequences  of 
financial  failure  and  must  eschew  the  spirit  of 


64  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

adventure  that  is  the  breath  of  business  enter- 
prise. An  early  convert  to  Tariff  Reform,  one 
predicts  that  his  tenure  of  his  present  office  as 
Chancellor  of  the  Exchequer  will  modify  his 
views  considerably,  and  that  he  will  end  by 
rejecting  Protectionist  theory,  and  being  a 
Free  Trader  with  some  reserves.  In  labour 
matters,  he  believes  that  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  absolute  ownership  either  of  work  done  or 
profits  made  ;  both  should  be  regarded  as  a 
trust,  and  he  would  probably  prefer  to  express 
the  ideal  relations  of  Capital  and  Labour  in  the 
terms  of  a  deed  of  partnership  in  work  and  its 
rewards  rather  than  in  any  other  way,  and  the 
practical  problem  is  to  discipline  this  partner- 
ship in  the  terms  of  the  general  interest.  While 
he  was  still  at  the  Board  of  Trade,  he  gave 
much  attention  to  finance.  A  member  of  the 
Cabinet  Committee  on  Finance,  he  early  became 
one  of  those  who  recognise  finance  as  the 
master  of  politics  and  incidentally  a  dragon 
across  the  path  of  the  present  Government. 
So  far  no  one  can  say  whether  he  is  likely  to 
make  a  success  of  his  office  as  Chancellor  of 
the  Exchequer.  Those  who  began  by  envying 
him  his  promotion,  a  few  months  later  were 
pitying  him  for  it — so  grave  were  his  tasks. 

It  is  too  early  to  say  that  he  has  pieced 
what  he  has  learned  since  he  entered  politics 


SIR    ROBERT    HORNE  65 

into  a  coherent  system,  but  there  is  no  one 
else  among  the  younger  Conservatives  who 
looks  like  doing  it.  On  him  more  than  on 
anyone  else  depends  the  permanence  of  an 
alliance  between  the  new  Liberals  and  the 
new  Conservatives.  Already,  he  seems  marked 
out  as  the  natural  successor  of  Mr.  Bonar  Law, 
but  one  does  not  see  him  gaining  the  undisputed 
headship  of  the  Conservative  Party  which  was 
bestowed  on  Mr.  Law  by  the  accidents  of 
intestinal  quarrel.  As  a  Conservative  pure  and 
simple,  he  has  a  future,  but  not  one  that  will 
bring  out  all  of  which  he  is  capable.  If  he  is 
to  be  first  Minister  in  the  State — and  there  are 
those  who  think  he  may  be — it  will  be  through 
a  new  party  formed  by  fusing  the  progressive 
elements  that  now  exist  side  by  side  within  the 
Coalition. 


LORD  READING 


Lord  Reading. 


IV 

LORD    READING 

RUFUS  ISAACS  was  twenty-seven  before 
he  found  his  way  to  the  law.  A  rebel 
at  school,  he  presently  ran  away  to 
sea  in  the  Blair  Athol,  where  both  romance  and 
indiscipline  caught  it  very  badly ;  and  then 
an  office  stool  in  his  father's  business  and 
stockbroking  in  turn  engaged  his  romantic 
inattention. 

At  the  Bar  his  success  was  immediate,  and 
at  thirty-seven  he  took  silk  and  was  in  every 
case  of  importance.  The  contrast  between 
his  early  unsettlement  and  his  extraordinary 
brilliancy  at  the  Bar  has  naturally  made  people 
(always  anxious  to  get  their  famous  men  con- 
veniently labelled)  think  of  him  as  a  lawyer. 
But  he  was  never  a  lawyer  in  the  sense  in  which 
Benjamin  and  Jessel  were  lawyers,  and,  though 
he  had  many  of  the  qualities  of  a  good  judge, 
it  may  be  doubted  whether  legal  history  will 
put  him  among  the  great  Lord  Chief  Justices. 
He  made  no  law,  few  of  his  judgments  are 
likely  to  be  remembered,  and  at  times,  for  all 

69 


70  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

his  patience  and  dignity,  he  has  seemed  to 
sit  as  uneasily  on  the  Judicial  Bench  as  on  an 
office  stool.  The  truth  is  that  he  is  not  a  man 
of  science,  but  a  man  of  affairs.  Law  to  him 
was  a  fulcrum  of  affairs,  and  though  his  time 
had  to,  his  mind  never  willingly  consented  to 
wear  its  fetters. 

To  some  the  spectacle  of  a  man  winning 
reputation  and  high  place  in  the  profession  of 
law  and  historical  fame  in  other  directions  is 
in  the  nature  of  an  annoying  paradox.  But 
there  are  some  minds  which  cannot  be  bound 
even  by  a  profession  so  exacting  and  jealous  as 
the  law,  and  Lord  Reading's  is  one  of  them. 
Napoleon  was  a  great  winner  of  battles,  but 
he  was  a  statesman  with  an  interest  in  military 
affairs  rather  than  a  soldier  in  the  narrow 
professional  sense.  Similarly,  Lord  Reading 
was  a  great  winner  of  battles  in  the  Courts,  but 
not  a  lawyer  contained  and.  bounded  by  his 
profession.  The  great  things  in  his  life  are 
not  his  conduct  of  celebrated  cases  in  the 
Courts,  but  his  advice  on  finance  at  the  begin- 
ing  of  the  war,  his  embassies  to  the  United 
States,  and  (one  adds  it  confidently,  though  it 
is  still  in  the  future)  his  tenure  of  the  Vice- 
royalty  of  India. 

It  is  usual  to  attribute  both  his  success  in 
commercial  cases  at  the  Bar  and  his  mastery  of 


LORD    READING  71 

finance  to  his  experience  of  commerce  before  he 
went  to  the  Bar,  but  this,  after  all,  was  too  short 
to  have  given  him  much  more  than  a  nodding 
acquaintance  with  some  of  its  technicalities. 
It  is  one  of  the  foibles  of  business  men  that 
they  never  attribute  any  knowledge  or  com- 
mand of  their  affairs  by  an  outsider  to  the 
pure  qualities  of  mind,  but  always  to  the 
wrinkles  of  practical  experience,  and  attention 
has  been  concentrated  on  the  few  years  in 
which  Lord  Reading  was  engaged  not  over- 
successfully  in  business  to  the  neglect  of  certain 
commanding  qualities  of  mind  which  have  given 
him  his  real  distinction.  He  is,  in  fact,  one  of 
the  great  intellectuals  of  our  time — none  the 
less  an  intellectual  because  his  mind  has  had 
its  exercise  not  in  books,  but  in  affairs. 

Every  successful  lawyer  has  in  a  greater  or 
less  degree  the  gift  of  singling  out  the  essential 
fact  or  idea  from  a  mass  of  details  and  the 
power  of  concentrating  on  that.  Lord  Reading 
has  in  addition  the  gift  of  generalisation,  which 
has  always  been  one  of  the  distinctive  gifts  of 
the  Jewish  race,  enabling  him  to  reduce  great 
masses  of  fact  to  order  and  discipline,  the  same 
racial  instinct  for  a  big  simple  idea,  and 
immense  logical  courage.  These  are  formid- 
able gifts  ;  and  when  they  are  combined  (as 
they  are  in  his  case)  with  the  patience  which 


72  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

notoriously  is  not  characteristic  of  the  Jewish 
race,  with  humihty  in  the  acquisition  of  know- 
ledge, and  with  a  singular  simplicity  and 
charm  of  manner,  they  are  quite  irresistible  gifts. 
It  is  now  generally  known  that  the  financial 
policy  that  saved  the  country  from  economic 
breakdown  at  the  beginning  of  the  war  was 
Lord  Reading's.  It  was  not  that  he  alone  had 
the  knowledge  which  others  lacked,  but  that 
he  alone  had  the  courage  to  insist  that  his  intel- 
lectual conviction  of  what  was  necessary  to 
prevent  a  financial  crash  should  be  expressed 
in  action.  Of  all  the  acts  of  courage  done  in 
the  war,  the  arrangement  by  which  the  State, 
after  the  moratorium  had  been  proclaimed, 
agreed  to  ensure  the  payment  of  bills  of 
exchange  was  perhaps  the  most  remarkable. 
The  liability  ran  into  hundreds  of  millions  ; 
the  actual  loss  was  a  few  thousands  at  most. 
This  was  Lord  Reading's  doing,  and  as  a 
supreme  example  of  intellectual  courage  it  is 
sufficient  in  itself  to  ensure  him  a  niche  in  the 
fame  of  the  war.  At  the  Bar,  when  Lord 
Reading  was  convinced  that  a  client  was 
wrong,  he  would  advise  a  settlement  with  the 
same  confidence  whether  the  amount  at  stake 
were  a  few  shillings  or  hundreds  of  thousands 
of  pounds.  Here  was  an  example  of  the  same 
splendid  courage  writ  large  in  national  history. 


LORD    READING  73 

In  purely  party  politics  Lord  Reading  was 
a  child,  and  he  was  not  successful  in  the  House. 
It  was  almost  pathetic  to  contrast  the  innocence 
with  which  he  would  note  up  the  briefs  of 
party  prejudice  and  controversy,  and  the 
mastery  with  which  he  would  handle  specific 
problems  of  affairs,  whether  in  his  legal  or  his 
political  work.  He  was  always  a  genuine  and 
sincere  Liberal,  and  his  best  speeches  were 
those  made  on  some  simple  general  principle 
of  politics,  not  those  in  which  he  was  speaking 
from  a  party  brief.  But  though  he  was  a 
comparative  failure  on  the  political  platform, 
in  private  conference  his  faculty  for  plucking 
the  heart  out  of  a  subject,  his  suavity,  and  his 
unruffled  coolness  made  him  invaluable.  It 
was  to  these  gifts  that  his  missions  to  America 
owed  their  great  success.  No  one  did  more 
for  Anglo-American  friendship  in  the  war,  and 
no  one  has  developed  more  effectively  the  old 
theme  of  the  common  law  which  they  share  as 
a  bond  of  union  between  the  two  countries. 
The  Bible  and  Blackstone — on  this  rock  shall 
they  build  who  work  for  enduring  projects  of 
friendship  between  England  and  America. 

This  vision  in  finance,  and  diplomatic  skill 
in  adjusting  the  details  of  financial  and  com- 
mercial co-operation,  take  us  far  from  the 
ordinary  ideas  of  the  lawyer.     The  next  step 


74  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

in  Lord  Reading's  career,  the  Viceroy alty  of 
India,  takes  us  farther  away  stilL  But  the 
conception  of  law  as  a  science  which  dries  up 
the  marrow  and  of  its  practice  as  the  fashioning 
of  thorny  verbal  bouquets  is,  after  all,  mere 
vulgar  prejudice.  There  is  a  type  of  lawyer  for 
whom  law  is  a  science,  and  its  practice  like  a 
musty  monastic  penance.  But  there  is  another 
type  to  whom  it  is  an  instrument  of  political 
liberty,  as  it  was  to  Coke  and  the  great 
common  lawyers  of  Stuart  days,  a  mould  into 
which  our  glowing  aspirations  are  run  to  cool 
and  harden.  To  this  second  type  Lord  Read- 
ing belongs,  and  his  distinction  is  a  refutation 
of  the  common  fallacy  that  a  man  cannot  have 
both  a  legal  and  a  practical  constructive  mind. 
It  is  odd  that  though  England,  which  owes 
so  much  of  its  liberties  to  lawyers,  should  be  in 
danger  of  forgetting  the  debt,  India  should 
have  fallen  in  love  with  the  prospect  of  a 
lawyer-Viceroy.  Doubtless  with  the  vast 
majority  of  the  Indians  who  have  hailed  his 
appointment,  the  justice  that  is  in  his  title  is 
his  chief  attraction,  for  the  man  himself  and 
his  qualities  are  unknown  to  them.  But  some 
there  are  who  know  the  great  part  that  the 
common  law  has  played  in  English  history  in 
curbing  the  tyranny  of  the  Executive,  and 
Lord  Reading,  as  several  of  his  speeches  have 


LORD    READING  75 

shown,  goes  out  to  India  with  a  passionate 
faith  in  law  as  the  great  weapon  of  constitu- 
tional progress.  It  is  a  great  experiment,  this 
mission  of  Lord  Reading's  to  the  East,  and 
none  the  less  romantic  because  its  ideals  are 
clothed  in  the  quiet  sober  garments  of  the  law. 
If  it  succeeds  — and  the  omens  are  favourable  — 
we  may  break  down  part  of  that  barrier  which 
separates  the  law  and  the  Executive,  and  a  new 
class  of  administrators  may  arise  whose  experi- 
ence has  been  gained  in  the  hard  school  of  the 
law.  The  convention  which  prescribes  a 
judicial  cloister  as  the  sanctified  close  of  a 
life  of  legal  success  appeals  to  some  minds, 
but  not  to  all,  and  Lord  Reading  has  done 
much  to  break  it  down. 


MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE 


C/2 

o 


V 

MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE 

MR.  LLOYD  GEORGE  has  been  in 
politics  for  thirty  years,  and  for 
nearly  fifteen  of  them  has  straddled 
right  across  the  path,  so  that  no  one  has  been 
able  to  get  past  him  either  way.  There  is  no 
career  in  English  politics  equal  to  his  in 
variety  and  acuteness  of  interest,  none  so 
baffling  to  a  fair  judgment,  and  certainly  none 
that  has  had  so  magnificent  a  stage-setting.  In 
one  act  the  Empire  is  in  danger,  in  a  second 
the  British  Constitution,  and  in  a  third  the 
whole  world  rocks  almost  to  its  fall ;  twice  the 
millennium  expensively  dawns  ;  and  there  are 
numerous  transformation  scenes,  with  one  still 
to  come.  Nor  has  human  nature's  need  of 
refreshment  between  the  acts  been  entirely 
overlooked  by  the  management.  And  through- 
out it  is  the  personality  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George, 
at  times  heroic  in  its  proportions,  at  other 
times  more  like  Puck,  that  lends  unity  to 
the  whole  drama.  Except  him,  every  other 
character    who     was     in    at    the     beginning 

79 


80  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

is  either  killed,  moribund,  or  pensioned. 
Stupor  mundi,  he  alone  remains,  and  with  more 
right  to  the  title  than  Barbarossa's  grandson 
ever  had. 

But  he  is  a  Colossus  with  two  strides,  not 
one  ;  and  each  must  be  considered  separately. 
On  the  first  stride,  history  will  pronounce  him 
the  Welshman  who  failed  to  reverse  the  Norman 
conquest.  On  the  second,  he  bestrides  not 
only  England,  but  the  world,  but  one  foot  is 
still  in  suspense,  and  so  is  the  judgment  of 
history.  Unwillingly,  an  estimate  must  pay 
some  attention  to  chronology. 

I.— 1892-1910 

He  began  as  Owen-Glendower  in  a  bowler, 
bent  on  reversing  old  defeats  and  on  winning 
Home  Rule  for  his  beloved  Wales,  then  flushed 
with  a  decent  Sinn  Fein  which  made  of  every 
chapel  a  miniature  city-state,  each  with  its 
little  Pericles  and  Euripides,  inglorious  but 
rarely  mute.  The  chapel  was  his  secondary 
school,  his  uncle,  David  Lloyd,  his  noblest 
teacher  and  friend.  Foiled  after  five  years  in 
Parliament  in  his  early  ambition  to  create  an 
Independent  Nationalist  Party  for  all  Wales 
with  himself  as  its  Parnell,  he  invaded  English 
politics  proper,  and  most  people  date  at  this 
time  the  end  of  his  Welsh  period.     On  the 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  81 

contrary,    it   lasted   at   any   rate   until    1910. 

During  most  of  these  years   he  was   making 

what  boys   used  to  call   "  transfers  "   of  the 

Welsh  world  and  its  philosophy  on  to  English 

politics.     With  him,  provinciality  was  not  (as 

with  too  many)  something  to  be  brushed  off, 

like  dust  from  the  boots,  but  a  conqueror's 

emblem,  a  bladder  to  support  him  on  the  sea 

of  glory.     His  agitation  against  the  Boer  War 

reflected    the    country-bred    man's    dislike    of 

industrialism  and  of  the  power  of  the  purse  in 

politics  (a  sentiment  visible  also  in  the  country 

towns  of  England  at  this  time),  and  was  the 

passionate  protest  from  a  small  nation  against 

overwhelming  physical  odds,  not  the  expression 

of  any  theory  about  Imperial  questions.     Wise 

or  not,  it  did  him  honour,  and  he  has  never 

since  been  quite  so  happy  as  in  these  martyr 

days.     It  did  him  service,  too,  for  it  earned 

him  a  reputation  for  courage  to  which  he  has 

not  always  lived  up,  made  him  leader  of  the 

left  wing  of  the  Liberal  Party,  and  gave  him 

that   uncanny   insight   into   military   realities 

which   he   was   later   to   turn   to   such   great 

national  use. 

To  Wales  again  and  its  innocence  of  the 
self-sufficiency  of  bureaucracy  must  be  ascribed 
his  success  in  his  first  office  as  President  of 
the  Board  of  Trade.     He  actually  consulted 


82  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

business  men  and  workpeople  in  preparing 
legislation  that  affected  them,  and  it  was  now 
that  the  world  discovered  that  the  enthusiast, 
so  far  from  being  an  extremist,  was  an  arch- 
accommodator.  Welsh  temperament  again, 
and  the  surroundings  of  his  youth,  set  the  key 
in  the  revivalist  fervour  of  his  campaign  of 
social  reform  as  Chancellor  ;  but  though  he  now 
became  famous,  his  Chancellorship  was  the 
least  successful  period  of  his  life.  Always  a 
man  of  humanity  and  genuine  democratic 
instinct,  his  early  attitude  towards  the  land 
and  the  landed  classes  was  Welsh  rather  than 
English,  and  though  natural  and  modern 
enough  to  the  Welsh  farmer-nationalist  exas- 
perated by  the  tyranny  of  an  alien  or  Angli- 
cising aristocracy,  it  was  obsolescent  here,  or 
.would  have  been  but  for  the  folly  of  his 
opponents'  tactics.  Yet  it  is  characteristic  of 
the  man  that  in  the  middle  of  all  this  bitter 
controversy  he  was  the  one  on  the  Liberal  side 
in  the  famous  conferences  of  1910  who  was 
willing  to  carry  compromise  farthest.  As 
great  a  generator  of  steam  as  Gladstone,  he 
could  cool  and  condense  his  own  steam  as  well 
as  Disraeli  himself. 

When  he  first,  as  a  very  young  man,  saw  the 
House  of  Commons,  he  confessed  to  his  diary 
that  he  felt  like  William  eyeing  England  on  his 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  83 

visit  to  Edward  the  Confessor.  He  did  not 
keep  a  diary  in  his  Chancellor  days,  or  he 
might  have  compared  himself  to  Arthur  come 
back  with  Excalibur  to  drive  out  the  Normans  ; 
certainly,  if  there  was  no  Celtic  reconquest  of 
England,  it  was  no  fault  of  the  Tories,  who 
fought  like  Harold,  with  equal  valour  and 
stupidity.  But  there  was  one  distinctively 
English  influence  on  his  politics  at  this  time — 
that  of  Chamberlain.  The  Whiggish  end  of 
Liberalism  had  no  interest  for  him  as  a  Welsh- 
man, and  always,  from  a  boy  onwards,  he 
inclined  to  Chamberlain  and  the  Radicals. 
Their  views  on  Home  Rule  were  barely  dis- 
tinguishable ;  they  both  had  an  advanced 
social  policy  and  curled  their  lips  when  they 
talked  of  dukes  ;  both,  apart  from  this  conces- 
sion to  Radical  convention,  were  realists  in 
temperament.  It  was  an  accident  that  he  did 
not  leave  Gladstone  when  Chamberlain  did  ;  it 
was  not  an  accident,  but  deliberate  policy,  that 
set  him  to  do  all  the  things  that  Chamberlain 
might  have  done  if  he  had  not  gone  over,  or  if, 
later,  Balfour  had  let  him  leave  the  Conserva- 
tives and  start  a  new  party  of  his  own.  They 
had  different  objectives,  but  with  both  the  key 
to  progress  was  fiscal  reform ;  and  though,  with 
the  one,  this  meant  taxation  through  the 
Customs  and,  with  the  other,  taxation  through 


84  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

the  Excise,  there  was  otherwise  not  much 
between  them.  For  Lloyd  George  was  no 
more  a  Free-trader  by  conviction  than  he  was 
a  Protectionist.  PoHtical  theories  and  half  the 
so-called  principles  of  party  were  to  him  only 
the  fossils  of  history,  which  men  in  spectacles 
might  tap  with  their  hammers,  but  were  not 
to  be  allowed  to  interfere  with  the  romantic 
enjoyment  of  the  scenery.  It  was  like  the  man 
that  he  should  have  been  dissatisfied  even  with 
the  cataclysmic  Liberal  victory  in  the  elections 
of  1906,  and  should  have  insisted  that  rival 
social  legislation  based  on  a  rival  fiscal  reform 
was  necessary  to  make  good  the  ground  won. 
These  were  the  subjects  he  was  really  interested 
in ;  on  such  matters  as  naval  armaments  and 
our  relations  with  Germany  he  took  a  strong 
line,  but  did  not  think  for  himself.  He  adopted 
the  handiest  views  from  his  Liberal  associates, 
usually  from  the  naval  economists,  because  he 
wanted  the  money  to  finance  his  own  policy, 
but  on  occasion,  as  in  the  celebrated  speech  in 
1911,  from  Sir  Edward  Grey.  The  war  brought 
no  solution  in  the  continuity  of  his  political 
development.     It  only  changed  the  conditions. 

II.— 1910-1918 

To  what  did  Lloyd  George  owe  his  power  ? 
Not  to  electoral  infallibility,  for  by  no  means 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  85 

all  his  political  campaigns  were  successful. 
His  early  Welsh  Home  Rule  scheme  ran 
aground  on  the  fact  that  there  are  two  Wales es 
as  there  are  two  Irelands  ;  and  after  the  first 
election  in  1910,  he  rightly  regarded  the  finance 
of  his  social  policy  as  beaten  and  was  only  too 
glad  that  the  Lords  had  presented  him  with  the 
constitutional  issue.  Not  to  his  oratory,  for, 
despite  some  war  speeches  of  lyrical  perfection, 
and  some  admirable  recent  examples  of  lucid 
exposition,  he  is  not  in  the  apostolic  succession 
of  English  oratory.  An  incomparable  actor,  a 
spell -binder,  a  perfect  conductor  of  electrical 
discharge,  a  crowd- compeller  and  master  of 
mass-psychology,  but  not  a  builder  of  stately 
argument  nor  a  sculptor  in  words  of  ideals  of 
such  mental  and  moral  beauty  that  all  who 
hear  must  forsake  everything  else  and  follow 
them.  Nor  to  intellectual  equipment,  though 
this  was  much  greater  than  is  commonly 
supposed.  The  whole  world  was  Mr.  Lloyd 
George's  school,  and  he  never  ceased  learning ; 
but  he  suffered  from  the  lack  of  the  early 
mental  discipline,  without  which  a  man  rarely 
attains  the  great  virtue  of  intellectual  patience. 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  has  the  quickest  mind  in 
politics,  but  it  is  impatient  of  detail,  incapable 
of  avoiding  a  short  cut,  and  prone  to  the 
skimble-skamble    when  he  is  not    interested. 


86  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

He  trips  over  his  own  nimbleness.  And  as  he 
grew  older,  his  respect  for  the  expert,  for 
storied  learning,  and  for  the  artistry  and 
craftsmanship  of  life  grew  less  and  less,  his 
faith  in  extemporisation,  in  power  of  "  rigging  " 
and  "  fixing  up  "  anything  grew  more  and 
more.  He  is  one  of  the  few  Englishmen 
who  believed  that  machinery  in  politics,  as  in 
industry,  is  only  made  to  be  scrapped. 

Nor,  again,  did  he  make  his  way  by  the  sheer 
force  of  character  like  that  moral  Behemoth, 
Gladstone. 

He  is  very  human,  amiably  so  as  a  rule,  but 
not  always.  He  draws  his  refreshing  drink 
from  springs  that  are  pure,  but  the  wells  of 
politics  are  situate  in  muddy  and  trampled 
fields,  and  some  of  his  people  often  have 
Noticeably  dirty  boots.  He  avoids  Gladstone's 
mistake  of  leaving  human  nature  out  of 
account,  but  tactics,  at  any  rate  since  his 
rupture  with  the  official  Liberals,  have  had  too 
great  an  influence  on  his  policy.  He  is  Welsh 
in  his  desire  to  please,  and  in  his  power  to  put 
himself  at  another's  point  of  view,  and  for 
that  reason  he  will  both  talk  down  to  a  very 
low  common  measure  of  intelligence  in  a  crowd, 
and  talk  up  to  the  views  of  one  who  is  seeing 
him  privately,  and  this  last  will  often  go  away 
leaping  for  joy  to  have  found  his  spiritual 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  87 

affinity,  whereas  before  he  is  many  yards 
away  Mr.  Lloyd  George  may  be  exhibiting  the 
same  power  of  charm  and  understanding  to 
one  who  holds  exactly  the  opposite  views. 
Some  call  it  duplicity ;  rather  is  it  the 
vacillation  of  the  water-diviner's  rod.  In 
public  and  private  utterances  he  exhibits  the 
same  combination  of  simplicity  and  subtlety — 
simplicity  in  the  general  aim  and  proposition, 
subtlety  in  the  choice  of  the  particular  instances 
and  of  the  means  for  the  fulfilment  of  his 
desire.  Neither  social  rank  nor  reputation 
makes  any  difference  to  his  estimate  of  a  man, 
and  he  always  judges  for  himself.  Flouting 
the  conventions,  but  extremely  sensitive  to 
criticism  ;  despising  the  forms  and  ceremonies 
of  high  place,  but  a  lover  of  power  who  can 
at  times  be  Napoleonic  in  his  decisions  ;  his 
genius  for  understanding  others  has  often, 
by  raising  false  hopes,  encouraged  misunder- 
standing of  himself.  He  is  as  often  the  victim 
of  his  own  charm  as  the  exploiter  of  it. 

No,  the  distinctive  gift,  which  has  made  him 
the  greatest  natural  genius  for  politics  in  our 
history,  is  his  realistic  unveiling  vision,  which 
enables  him  to  see  parties  and  situations,  as  it 
were,  in  cross-section,  to  observe  the  Tory 
subsoil  in  which  the  giants  of  the  Liberal  forest 
have  their  roots,  and  to  detect  the  Radical 


88  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

inside  in  pillars  of  the  Tory  faith.  This  power 
of  seeing  unity  in  differences  and  differences  in 
unity  constitutes  his  wizardry  in  conference. 
He  is  at  once  an  explosive  of  party  union  and  a 
builder  of  flying  bridges  between  incompatibles. 
In  fact,  he  is  a  born  coalitionist. 

As  long  ago  as  1910  he  had  the  idea  of 
coalition.  Why  not  ?  He  was  on  the  modern 
side  and  had  no  reverence  for  the  classic 
traditions  of  party  ;  as  a  young  Welshman,  he 
cared  nothing  for  either  except  in  so  far  as  it 
could  serve  Wales.  And  when  he  became 
naturalised  in  English  politics  he  retained  this 
very  wholesome  view  of  party  as  a  servant,  not 
a  master ;  as  a  realist,  he  knew  that  the 
hideous  masks  and  stinkpots  of  party  con- 
troversies, which  he  himself  used  with  such 
effect,  had  little  to  do  with  facts,  and  still  less 
with  conviction  or  efficiency.  In  1910,  this 
keen  rationalism  was  in  advance  of  the  times, 
but  the  war  made  coalition  not  only  possible 
but  necessary,  and  luckily  it  brought  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  to  the  head  of  affairs.  There  has  been 
a  vast  amount  of  controversy  on  whether  he 
was  or  was  not  personally  loyal  to  Mr.  Asquith 
in  1915  and  at  the  end  of  1916.  But,  if  it  is 
agreed  (and  it  generally  is)  that  to  win  the 
war  it  was  necessary  that  Mr.  Asquith  should 
go  and  Mr.  Lloyd  George  succeed  him,  personal 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  89 

loyalty  might  have  been  indulged  to  the 
extent  of  becoming  public  vice,  and  there  is 
no  question  save  whether  the  substitution  was 
done  decently.     It  was. 

It  would  be  almost  impossible  to  praise  Mr. 
Lloyd  George's  qualities  as  a  war  Prime 
Minister  too  highly.  It  brought  out  the  pure 
gold  of  his  genius,  as  those  who  knew  him  in 
1900  might  have  predicted  that  it  would.  His 
realism  in  war  was  like  a  gift  from  heaven. 
He  had  more  strategy  in  his  little  finger  than 
the  average  general  in  his  whole  body  ;  he 
was  the  first  to  discover  that  industry  at  home 
was  the  army  at  the  base,  and  to  act  upon  his 
discovery ;  and  (except,  perhaps,  for  a  few 
moments  in  1917)  he  never  lost  faith  in  our 
victory,  and  inspired  others  with  his  faith  and 
with  his  works.  These  things  should  not  be 
forgotten,  nor  shall  we  be  allowed  to  forget 
them.  What  is  much  more  easily  forgotten  is 
that  these  war  virtues  are  the  same  qualities 
that  we  disliked  or  admired  (according  to  fancy) 
in  Mr.  Lloyd  George  before  the  war. 

What,  then,  makes  the  difference  between 
their  efficacy  in  war  and  their  comparative 
inefficacy  before  and  since  ?  Inefficacy  before, 
for  apart  from  the  Insurance  Act  (passed  after 
1910),  how  much  pure  spirit  remains  from  the 
distillations  of  those  social  reform  days,  and 


90  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

who  knows  whether  Mr.  Lloyd  George  is  not 
the  severest  critic  of  his  controversial  methods 
in  that  period,  and  how  far  his  affection  for 
Coalition  is  not  the  repentance  of  the  morn- 
ing's headaches  ?  Inefficacy  after,  for  at  the 
highest  valuation  of  the  work  of  the  Coalition, 
it  is  obviously  in  its  present  shape  not  a 
permanent  instrument  either  of  union  or  pro- 
gress. There  are  those  who  explain  everything 
that  they  do  not  understand  in  affairs  by  the 
theory  of  some  deflation  of  moral  earnestness. 
It  will  not  do  in  this  case,  for  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
now  works  harder  than  ever,  and  no  man  has 
ever  been  so  faithful  to  his  upbringmg  as  he 
to  Llanystumdwy. 

The  explanation  is  that  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
neither  is  nor  was  Liberal  or  Conservative,  but 
is  now  as  before  the  typical  Radical.*  In 
ordinary  times  the  Radical  stands  midway 
between  the  parties,  having  points  of  contact 
with  both,  but  belonging  to  neither.  Usually, 
though  not  always,  he  works  with  the  Liberals, 
but  often  he  goes  over  to  the  Conservative 
Party.  It  was  a  Radical  Disraeli  who  rescued 
the  old  Tory  Party  from  utter  ruin,  and  con- 
verted it  into  the  Conservative  Party  ;  it  was 
another  Radical  Chamberlain  who,  after  the 
Home  Rule  split,  made  a  new  school  of  British 

1  See  the  observations  on  the  use  of  this  term  on  p.  X27. 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  91 

Imperialism  and  Protection,  and  was  for  a 
time  the  dominating  influence  in  the  Tory 
Party  counsels  ;  it  was  a  third  Radical,  Lloyd 
George,  who  contributed  the  driving  force  to 
the  Liberal  Party  in  1906  and  succeeding 
years,  but  who  has  not  yet  gone  over  to  the 
Conservative  Party.  His  success  during  the 
war  was  due  to  the  fact  that  war  superseded 
party  distinctions,  and  produced  in  the  minds 
of  most  Englishmen  just  that  indifference  to 
party  names  to  which  Mr.  Lloyd  George  was 
born.  He  was  able  in  the  war  to  stand  as  his 
own  Radical  self,  the  first  Radical  in  our 
history  who  ever  done  so  in  high  place.  Before 
the  war  he  failed  partly  because  of  his  own  im- 
maturity, partly  because  he  was  not  in  his  own 
camp.  Nor  has  he  been  in  his  own  camp  since 
the  war.  Perhaps  the  chief  obstacle  to  an 
understanding  of  his  political  character  is  the 
idea,  very  prevalent  amongst  Liberals,  that 
the  war  made  him  a  pervert  and  extinguished 
his  reformer's  fires.  He  would  not  have  been 
human  if  the  war  had  left  him  unchanged, 
but  the  real  cleavage  of  his  life  came  in  1910, 
not  in  1914.  In  1910,  so  far  from  being  at  the 
pinnacle  of  his  career,  he  was  perilously  near 
to  failure,  and  it  was  then  that  he  discovered 
that  the  frontal  attack  was  not  the  last  word 
in  political  wisdom.     It  was  he  who  made  the 


92  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

suggestion  to  the  new  King  which  led  to  the 
constitutional  conference,  and  at  that  confer- 
ence he  discovered  how  much  he  had  in 
common  with  the  men  of  other  parties.  From 
that  moment  he  was  a  Coalitionist.  "  Men 
quarrel  too  much,"  he  has  been  heard  to  say. 
"  They  become  slaves  to  words  and  phrases. 
They  miss  the  reality."  Oh,  words  of  wisdom. 
For  Lloyd  George,  the  Radical,  has  points 
of  contact  with  both  Liberal  and  Conservative 
Parties  ;  so  has  every  other  Radical.  It  is  a 
toss-up  whether  the  Radical  goes  one  way  or 
the  other — a  toss-up  from  the  Radical's  point 
of  view — a  tragedy  when  one  thinks  how 
different  the  history  of  the  country  might  have 
been  if  Gladstone  had  not  shed  Chamberlain, 
and  Asquith  had  not  been  seduced  into 
conflict  with  Lloyd  George.  And  yet  even  the 
most  successful  revolting  Radical,  too,  has  his 
sorrows.  At  a  time  of  life  when  monogamic 
bliss  yields  the  solid  blessings,  he  finds  himself 
distracted  amid  a  seraglio  of  affinities. 

ni.— 1918-21 

Mr.  Lloyd  George  vigorously  resisted  the 
policy  which  led  to  the  war,  and  but  for  the 
German  invasion  of  Belgium,  he  would  have 
left  the  Government  along  with  Lord  Morley 
and  Mr.  John  Burns.     But,  once  in  the  war, 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  93 

he  showed  himself  the  true  Radical  in  allowing 
no  party  principles  or  prejudices  to  stand 
between  the  country  and  victory.  As  the  war 
approached  its  end — and  the  end  came  very 
suddenly — he  had  to  consider  what  his  future 
political  allegiance  should  be,  and  it  was 
natural  that  he  should  decide  to  continue  the 
Coalition.  The  single  command  and  the  single 
front  which  was,  perhaps,  his  greatest  con- 
tribution to  victory,  the  suggestions  for  com- 
promise between  the  parties  at  the  Conference 
of  1910,  and  the  idea  of  coalition  on  a  single 
domestic  front  to  solve  the  problems  of  peace  — 
have  we  not  here  the  same  logical  idea  through- 
out, varying  only  in  its  application  ?  And  here 
is  the  real,  the  mature  Lloyd  George.  He  could 
not  have  decided  differently  than  he  did,  but, 
in  fact,  the  decision  was  taken  out  of  his  hands. 
For  it  has  been  said  and  has  not  been  contra- 
dicted that  the  election  of  1918  was  originally 
designed  to  ask  for  a  mandate  to  finish  the  war, 
which  was  expected  to  last  till  1919,  and,  the 
war  finishing  earlier  than  was  expected,  it  had 
hurriedly  to  be  adapted  to  the  purposes  of  peace. 
It  was  a  terribly  difficult  task  that  awaited 
him  at  the  conclusion  of  hostilities,  and  the 
extravagant  expectations  of  peace  that  four 
years'  war  had  produced  in  men's  minds, 
and   too  sanoruine  and  ill-considered  election 


94  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

promises,  made  complete  success  in  his  task 
impossible  of  achievement.  A  whole  world  of 
foreign  policy  lay  in  ruins  and  had  to  be 
reconstructed  afresh ;  two  flatly  opposing 
conceptions  of  peace — ^the  French  and  the 
American — had  to  be  reconciled  with  each 
other  and  with  our  own.  It  was  so  long  since 
any  attention  had  been  given  to  the  finance  of 
international  trade  that  its  few  simple  laws  had 
been  forgotten.  On  the  top  of  all  that,  the  old 
party  landmarks  had  been  obliterated  and 
needed  to  be  marked  out  afresh.  The  intoler- 
ance of  the  straight- jacket  of  party,  the 
realist's  impatience  with  the  hollow  phrases  of 
party  controversy,  the  ambition  to  state  the 
problems  of  national  life  in  new  and  truer 
forms — these  had  been  the  notes  of  Mr.  Lloyd 
George's  political  life,  and  people  had  high 
hopes  of  what  he  might  accomplish.  To 
endow  our  politics  with  these  qualities 
would  be  an  even  greater  achievement  than 
victory  in  the  war,  and  (men  thought)  would 
make  the  natural  climax  of  his  tortuous  but 
not  inconsistent  political  life.  Had  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  accomplished  a  tithe  of  the  popular 
hopes  of  peace,  he  would  have  been  the  greatest 
man  of  all  time.  Yet  he  might  have  done 
more  had  he  realised  his  own  power  and 
indulged  his  genius  more  confidently.    He  was 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  95 

the  one  man  in  our  history,  and  1918  the  one 
year  in  which  he  was  free  to  form  a  Coahtion 
after  his  own  heart.  The  idea  of  coahtion  was 
right,  for  without  coalition  there  can  be  no  prac- 
tical politics  now.  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  in  1910, 
saw  even  farther  into  the  future  than  he  knew. 
Nor  is  it  that  this  coalition  has  not  done 
things  that  neither  Liberal  nor  Conserva- 
tive Party  could  possibly  have  done  singly 
with  the  other  in  Opposition.  Let  all  these 
things  be  conceded  with  full  measure.  What, 
then,  has  gone  wrong  ?  The  mistake  was  that 
the  Coalition  was  formed  on  too  wide  a  basis. 
Coalition,  if  it  is  to  be  more  than  a  stop-gap 
until  a  crisis  is  passed,  must  at  any  rate  be  an 
organic  unity,  drawn  from  men  of  several 
parties,  but  with  a  common  philosophy  of 
politics  or,  at  any  rate,  united  by  something 
more  than  a  willingness  to  sit  on  the  same 
benches.  But  this  Coalition,  as  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  said  of  the  Allies  after  the  Rapallo 
Conference,  is  not  a  unity,  but  a  mere  stitching 
together  of  half  a  dozen  interests  and  sets  of 
ideas— the  old  bureaucracy  represented  by  Mr. 
Austen  Chamberlain ;  the  new  bureaucracy 
(child  born  out  of  wedlock  of  social  policy  and 
the  war)  represented  by  Sir  Eric  Geddes  and 
Dr.  Addison ;  the  progressive  realists  by  Sir 
Robert  Home  and  a  group  of  young  Coalition- 


96  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

ists  ;  the  Conservative  idealists  by  the  back- 
bench Cecihans  ;  the  merely  stupid  interests 
and  the  merely  sharp  ;  and  the  two  machines, 
of  which  the  one  that  is  supposed  to  be 
in  efficient  working  order  is  becoming  every 
day  less  Coalitionist  and  more  Tory.  And  the 
sole  bond  of  unity  that  holds  these  elements 
together  is  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  without  a  capable 
lieutenant  of  his  own  school,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  Sir  Robert  Home,  for  Sir  Gordon 
Hewart  speaks  a  different  idiom,  and  Mr. 
Churchill  is  not  so  much  a  member  of  the 
Government  as  an  independent  principality. 
No  wonder  the  seams  began  to  start.  The 
clear-cut  decisions  for  which  Mr.  Lloyd  George 
was  famous  became  for  sometime  so  blurred 
that  they  were  unrecognisable.  His  Russian 
,  policy  was  a  shrewd  divination  of  the  popular 
mind  and  of  historical  reality  ;  and  it  might, 
had  it  been  pursued  consistently  from  the 
first,  have  had  all  the  measure  of  success  that 
usually  rewards  fidelity  to  a  clear  logical  idea. 
But  it  was  so  presented,  owing  to  the  necessity 
of  carrying  at  any  rate  the  nominal  assent  of 
his  colleagues,  that  its  enemies  hated  it  the 
more  for  its  disguise,  its  friends  could  not 
recognise  it  for  its  disguise,  and  anyhow  it 
came  cold  to  the  table.  So  with  the  Govern- 
ment's Irish  policy,  which  until  recently  was  a 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  97 

bad  mixture  of  political  shrewdness  with 
incompetence  and  malice  in  administration, 
like  the  sea  god  Glaucus  (to  adapt  the  Platonic 
simile),  whose  original  image  can  hardly  be 
discerned  because  his  natural  members  are 
broken  and  crushed  and  damaged  by  the 
waves,  and  incrustations  have  grown  over 
them  of  seaweed  and  shells  and  stories,  so  that 
he  is  more  like  some  monster  than  he  is  to  his 
natural  form.  And  so  in  many,  though  not 
all,  departments  of  policy,  not  because  the 
Government  is  a  Coalition,  but  because  the 
Coalition  is  what  it  is,  a  compendium  of  most 
parties  past  and  present,  not  the  party  of  the 
future  and  men's  hope.  And  the  absence  of 
unity  in  the  meantime  exaggerates  the  political 
vices  to  which  Mr.  Lloyd  George  is  prone.  His 
gift  of  accommodation  degenerates  into  ambi- 
guity, his  origi  ality  into  a  fitful  tyranny  and 
a  system  of  personal  rule.  He  is  a  hawk  that 
can  no  longer  swoop,  but  must  flutter  like  a 
bat  amongst  the  Tory  rafters. 

How  has  so  great  a  master  of  political 
tactics  brought  himself  to  this  pass  ?  Partly 
because  of  the  conditions  under  which  the  1918 
election  was  held.  Partly  because  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  has  had  so  much  work  that  he  has  had 
little  time  to  think.  Partly  lack  of  courage  or 
exaggerated  respect  for  the  machinery  of 
7 


98  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

party.  But  the  main  cause  was  that  the 
Coahtion  was  too  broad,  too  comprehensive. 
He  believed  rightly  in  a  combination  of  parties  ; 
but  he  opened  the  door  so  wide  that  he  ad- 
mitted those  whose  lack  of  sympathy  destroyed 
the  unity  of  the  Coalition,  aroused  the  slum- 
bering spirit  of  faction,  and  in  the  resultant 
vacillation  reflected  discredit  on  the  leader. 
For  the  churches  have  done  their  work  much 
better  than  the  schools,  and  in  sheer  inability 
to  understand  intellectual  problems  that  might 
well  baffle  genius  and  learning,  men  fall  back 
on  their  restatement  in  moral  terms  which 
they  can  understand,  and  think  they  can 
resolve.  Thus  every  baffling  political  quad- 
ratic instantly  becomes  with  these  critics  a 
simple  issue  of  right  and  wrong ;  every  surd 
in  diplomatic  algebra  is  a  proof  of  a  moral 
twist ;  every  partial  solution  of  a  world-wide 
problem  is  sure  sign  of  depravity.  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  has  suffered  from  this  facile  moralistic 
criticism.  If  one-half  the  energy  devoted  to 
moral  denunciation  had  been  given  to  intel- 
lectual appreciation  of  his  difficulties,  the  prob- 
lems might  by  now  have  been  nearer  solution. 
The  Radical-minded  man  who  aspires  to 
unite  factions  for  national  ends  has  many  pit- 
falls. One  is  Csesarism  (for  the  great  Julius 
himself  was  a  Radical,  and  as  a  sympathiser 


MR.    LLOYD    GEORGE  99 

with      the     revolutionary      Communism      of 

Catiline,   the  founder  of  the  Roman  Empire 

had  a  past  far  more  lurid  than  the  land-tax 

period  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George).     This  danger  took 

with  Mr.  Lloyd  George  the  exceedingly  mild 

form  of  looking  over  Lord  Curzon's  shoulder 

at    the    Foreign    Office,    and     appointing     a 

Minister    of   Transport.     A   second   pitfall   is 

Conservatism,     for     Conservatism     welcomes 

Radicals  because  it  thinks  from  past  experience 

that  it  can  transform  them  into  its  own.     Here 

Mr.  Lloyd  George  is  in  danger,  but  so  far  he 

has  avoided  the  fate  of  his  predecessors,  Disraeli 

and  Chamberlain,  and  he,  not  they,  has  so  far 

done  most  of  the  transforming.     A  third  pitfall 

is  ambiguity,  which  compromises  both  sides, 

and   here   Mr.  Lloyd     George     has    certainly 

not     escaped    reproach.     But  the   test   is  in 

the   end,   and  the   end  is   not    yet.       Dublin 

and  Washington  may  yet  be  his  salvation — 

Via  prima  salutis 
Quod  minime  reris,  Graia  pandetur  ab  urbe. 

Any  policy  would  have  drawn  converging  fire  of 
attack ;  and  open  order  and  mobile  manoeuvring 
may  have  been  the  only  way  to  reduce  casualties. 
But  as  time  goes  on — ^and  time  is  of  the 
essence  in  the  politics  of  Coalition — the  need 
for  concentration  which  sheds  irreconcilable 
elements  becomes  more  urgent. 


100  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

Ever  since  the  Coalition  was  formed,  well- 
meaning  people  have  been  offering  directions 
to  him,  but  the  wise  voices  were  those  that 
called  "  Left,"  "  Left,"  for,  contrary  to  what 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  himself  imagined  two  years 
ago,  the  immediate  future  is  not  with  Labour 
nor  with  Toryism,  but  with  some  form  of 
Liberalism.  He  is  now  like  a  man  riding  two 
horses  that  are  straining  apart.  His  future, 
clearly,  is  in  a  combination  of  progressive 
Conservatism  and  Liberalism  with  the  right 
wing  of  Labour.  As  a  Conservative  Prime 
Minister,  he  would  be  naught.  An  orthodox 
Liberal  he  never  has  been  nor  will  be.  Labour 
is  still  too  unformed  and  inchoate  in  its  views 
to  attract  a  leader  from  without.  There  are 
those  who  have  suggested  that  the  wisest 
course  may  be  for  the  Prime  Minister  to  rest 
awhile  from  labours  whose  continuous  strain 
has  been  almost  greater  than  human  endur- 
ance, in  the  expectation  of  returning  refreshed 
with  new  ideas  and  strength.  One  does  not 
see  Mr.  Lloyd  George  following  that  advice. 
But  the  alternative  is  a  movement  to  the  left, 
if  not  this  year,  then  not  later  than  next. 
Certain  it  is  that,  unless  he  escapes  from  the  toils 
of  pure  Tory  Party  faction  that  are  gathering 
round  him,  he  will  for  the  rest  of  his  days  be  a 
blind  Samson  in  the  house  of  the  Philistines. 


LORD  CURZON 


Lord  Curzon  of  Kedleston. 


[Ellioti  &  Fry 


VI 

LORD    CURZON 

THERE  is  no  aristocracy  left  but  ours 
capable  of  throwing  up  men  like  Lord 
Curzon,  who  assume  rule  over  others 
like  a  cross  of  duty,  and  practise  the  duty  like 
a  vice.  He  is  an  extreme  case  even  in  his  own 
class.  Love  of  power  for  gain,  or  for  the 
sake  of  some  idea  with  which  one  is  bursting, 
or  to  impress  one's  neighbours,  is  common 
enough,  but  these  were  not  his  motives. 

"  I  have  only  five  years,"  he  said  when  he 
became  Viceroy  of  India.  "  For  such  a  task 
every  year  seems  a  minute,  every  minute  a 
second  ;  one  might  almost  say  that  there  is 
hardly  time  to  begin."  Here  is  love  of  power 
for  its  own  sake,  perhaps,  but  no  vulgar  lust ; 
rather,  a  passion  of  service  that  is  almost 
a  religion,  a  passion  the  more  remarkable 
because  he  is  by  nature  cold,  neither  has  he 
any  single  overmastering  idea  of  his  own 
which  he  desires  to  impose.  It  is  the  ardour 
of  a  medieval  prelate  interpreting  the  ways  of 
the  immortals  to  men,  magnificently  ascetic, 

103 


104  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

haughtily  humble.  For,  haughty  vicegerent 
as  he  was,  Lord  Curzon  was  deeply  humble 
before  the  ideal  of  the  pax  Britannica  in  Asia 
which  he  served.  The  nobility  that  obliges  a 
man  to  wander  over  all  Asia,  to  study  deep, 
and  to  work  twice  as  hard  as  any  of  his  assis- 
tants is  something  that  the  British  aristocracy 
may  well  be  proud  of. 

It  is  said  to  have  been  some  glowing  words 
of  Sir  James  FitzJames  Stephen  heard  at  Eton 
that  kindled  the  enthusiasm  of  Lord  Curzon 
for  Asia.  Certainly  it  possessed  him  early  and 
never  left  him.  There  is  a  ridiculous  story 
about  how  certain  people  belonging  to  different 
nations  set  about  writing  a  treatise  on  the 
elephant.  The  Russian  shut  himself  up  in  a 
room  with  a  million  cigarettes,  and  at  the 
end  of  a  year  produced  a  book  entitled  The 
Elephant :  Does  he  Exist  ?  The  Pole  inter- 
viewed all  the  chancelleries  and  newspaper 
offices  in  Europe  and  finally  produced  a  massive 
tome  on  the  Elephant  and  the  Polish  Question. 
The  Frenchman  published  a  charming  book 
on  VElephant  et  ses  Amours,  But  the  English- 
man went  to  where  elephants  live  wild,  and 
finally  produced  a  bashful  ten-page  brochure 
of  Hints  on  the  Methods  of  Capturing  Elephants, 
Except  in  his  lack  of  bashfulness.  Lord  Curzon 
was  true  to  type.     His  enthusiasm  for  the  East 


LORD    CURZON  105 

took  the  characteristically  English  form  of 
determining  to  see  and  learn  everything  about 
it  for  himself.  He  climbed  the  Pamirs,  visited 
the  Court  of  Afghanistan,  wandered  in  Persia, 
and  wrote  a  great  book  about  it  which  has 
every  quality  but  charm,  studied  Russian 
methods  in  Central  Asia,  French  in  Cochin- 
China,  and  the  Japanese  at  home,  and  came 
back  to  English  politics  with  a  fervent  belief 
in  the  sacredness  and  grandeur  of  the  British 
mission  in  Asia.  Some  travellers — Sir  Mark 
Sykes,  for  example — when  they  go  to  Asia 
fall  in  love  with  one  of  its  ancient  civilisations, 
and  return  with  a  burning  desire  to  restore  it ; 
others,  such  as  Burton  and  Lawrence,  dye 
their  whole  minds  in  the  gorgeous  romance  of 
the  East ;  others,  like  Kinglake  of  "  Eothen," 
love  the  East  with  their  eyes,  never  with  their 
minds.  But  Lord  Curzon  travelled  the  East 
like  a  naturalist  in  politics,  and  returned  with 
an  unrivalled  collection  of  specimens  illus- 
trating the  science  of  government,  each  tribe 
and  place  duly  desiccated  and  transfixed  with 
a  pin  awaiting  the  benevolent  study  of  the 
British  Raj. 

He  went  to  the  Foreign  Office  under  Lord 
Salisbury,  for  whom  he  had  a  great  reverence, 
and  was  an  efficient  and  highly  unpopular 
Parliamentary     Under-Secretary.       But     the 


106  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Foreign  Office  was  only  a  waiting-room  for  him. 
He  had  every  quahfieation  that  knowledge 
and  study  could  give  him  for  the  highest  post 
in  Asia ;  character,  too,  enormous  industry, 
and  an  intellectual  conscientiousness  as  sensi- 
tive to  a  mistake  as  to  a  scandal.  Above  all, 
he  had  the  loftiest  ideal  of  Imperial  duty.  He 
became  Viceroy  of  India  at  thirty-nine,  and 
the  country  was  proud  to  send  a  Viceroy  with 
so  many  qualifications.  At  last  an  expert  was 
called  to  government.     Wonderful ! 

There  was  not  a  department  of  Indian 
Government  in  which  the  new  Viceroy  did  not 
make  his  influence  felt.  He  arrived  after  an 
unfortunate  frontier  war  in  which  more  British 
troops  had  been  engaged  than  ever  fought  under 
Wellington,  and  he  made  a  settlement  of  the 
frontier  problem  that  disappointed  the  forward 
school,  and  therein  showed  its  wisdom ;  he 
screwed  up  the  efficiency  of  the  Civil  Service 
by  his  celebrated  order  cutting  down  the 
length  and  the  frequency  of  written  reports  ; 
he  recognised  merit  and  obscure  hard  work ; 
he  insisted  on  equal  justice  between  Indians 
and  Europeans — rex  Jupiter  omnibus  idem. 
There  is  no  end  to  the  catalogue  of  good  and 
useful  things  that  he  did.  Even  the  partition 
of  Bengal,  which  made  him  so  unpopular, 
was    inspired    by     very     good    reasons,    and 


LORD    CURZON  107 

should  have  made  for  greater  administrative 
efficiency. 

And  yet  when  all  is  said  the  Viceroyalty  was 
the  end  of  an  old  epoch,  and  it  was  reserved  for 
others  to  begin  the  new.  The  very  virtues  of 
his  government  threw  into  bolder  relief  the 
discovery  that  even  in  the  East  the  days  were 
gone  by  when  any  people  will  be  content  to  let 
any  other  play  the  part  of  an  earthly  provi- 
dence to  them.  Campbell-Bannerman's  saying 
that  most  people  preferred  to  be  self-governed 
rather  than  well-governed  was  not  so  violent  a 
paradox  after  all,  and  it  holds — applied  with 
reason —even  in  Asia.  If  it  appears  strange 
that  a  man  of  Lord  Curzon's  ability  should  live 
in  Asia  for  years  and  read  everything  that 
anyone  had  ever  written  about  it,  and  still 
escape  a  truth  that  another  man  spots  between 
a  bite  of  muffin  and  a  cup  of  tea,  it  is  only  one 
of  the  proofs  of  the  limitations  of  the  expert 
with  which  politics  abound.  How  very 
different  the  modern  history  of  India  might 
have  been  if  one-half  the  toil  that  he  gave  to 
the  improvement  of  the  efficiency  of  English 
Government  in  India  had  been  given  to  pre- 
paring the  Indian  people  to  govern  themselves  ! 

No  one  went  to  India  from  England  knowing 
so  much  as  Lord  Curzon ;  yet  of  the  new 
chapters  in  the  British  history  of  Asia,  one  was 


108  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

begun  by  a  very  Western  Liberal,  Lord  Morley, 
another  by  a  doctrinaire  Jew,  yet  another  by 
Mark  Sykes  and  a  handful  of  British  officers, 
a  fourth,  in  Egypt,  by  Lord  Milner,  and  yet  a 
fifth  chapter,  that  in  Palestine,  by  one  of  the 
Cecil  family.  From  Lord  Curzon  nothing  new, 
nothing  of  the  future.  Indian  Imperialism, 
in  fact,  ended  with  his  Viceroyalty,  or  rather 
would  have  done  if  some  of  it  had  not  escaped 
and  run  amok  in  Mesopotamia.  For  one  thing, 
the  part  of  earthly  providence  is  one  that 
demands  limitless  resources,  which  we  have 
not  got ;  for  another,  we  now  realise  how 
much  finer  and  rarer  a  thing  it  is  in  politics  to 
make  a  nation  that  will  govern  itself.  Much 
the  finest  achievement  of  England  abroad 
has  been  the  making  of  the  self-governing 
Dominions  ;  we  are  now  attempting  the  more 
difficult  task  of  educating  alien  races  to 
commonwealth  status. 

In  the  home  politics  to  which  he  returned 
after  his  Viceroyalty,  Lord  Curzon' s  judgments 
are  well  meaning,  but  amateurish  and  shallow. 
In  the  constitutional  agitation  over  the  Lords 
he  was  indistinguishable  from  the  ruck  except 
for  the  greater  dignity  of  his  phrasing,  and  he 
adopted  the  Chamberlain  view  of  our  fiscal 
policy  and  of  our  relations  with  the  Dominions 
without   understanding   the   psychology   of  a 


LORD    CURZON  109 

working-man  either  here  or  in  the  Dominions. 
When  he  took  part  in  a  North  Country  election, 
he  was  caricatured  sitting  on  the  back  of  an 
elephant  coming  down  a  narrow  street  and 
scattering  the  plain  citizens,  and  to  this  day  he 
has  never  quite  got  rid  of  the  durbar  manner. 
He  is  heard  at  his  best  in  the  House  of  Lords, 
but  even  that  is  liable  at  any  moment  to  become 
a  gilded  howdah  swaying  in  time  with  his 
stately  tread.  Or  (to  change  the  longitude  of 
the  metaphor)  the  peers,  when  he  speaks,  are 
made  to  experience  the  inconvenience  of  tenants 
trying  to  hold  conversation  on  foot  with  the 
squire  mounted  on  the  back  of  a  horse  which 
persists  in  turning  in  a  circle.  He  is  one 
of  the  most  exact  speakers  in  politics  ;  he  has 
historical  imagination,  and  conveys  as  few 
others  can  do  a  sense  of  the  material  and  moral 
greatness  of  the  British  Empire  ;  he  is  audible, 
too.  But  he  is  also  the  schoolmaster  of  the 
House,  and  that  not  quite  in  the  sense  in  which 
the  word  was  used  of  ancient  Athens,  but  in 
the  less  flattering  sense  of  one  who  awards 
marks  and  gives  impositions.  With  the  big 
boys  he  gets  on  well  enough ;  but  idealogues, 
Liberals,  seers  of  visions,  and  the  whole  brood 
of  intuitionists  in  politics  are  definitely  in  his 
lower  school.  And  in  his  relations  with  any 
democracy,  whether  of  voters  or  of  Glasgow 


110  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

students,  there  will  always  supervene  some 
period  of  huffiness  and  injured  dignity. 

He  succeeded  Mr.  Balfour  at  the  Foreign 
Office,  but,  as  the  real  head  of  the  Foreign 
Office  is  the  Prime  Minister,  Lord  Curzon  has 
had  very  little  chance  to  show  his  quality. 
He  has  a  reverence  for  an  accomplished  fact 
even  of  the  political  hierarchy,  and  he  is  very 
loyal  to  the  fixed  and  settled  policy  of  the 
Government.  But  he  initiates  nothing,  and 
if  he  did,  would  probably  be  overruled,  for  he 
is  not  in  possession  of  the  keys  to  the  new 
heaven.  He  is  said  to  obstruct  and  to  have 
opposed  the  Egyptian  scheme  of  Lord  Milner, 
and  doubtless  also  the  transfer  of  Egypt  (if 
this  had  been  arranged)  to  the  Colonial  Office 
along  with  the  rest  of  the  Middle  East.  But 
his  main  duty  at  the  Foreign  Office  is  to  give 
precision  and  definiteness  to  sketchy  outlines 
of  policy  and  dress  the  resultant  figure  in  the 
Foreign  Office  toga.  This  he  does  very  well, 
but  there  is  not  the  making  of  a  great  Foreign 
Office  Secretary  in  it.  Perhaps  he  would  do 
greater  service  as  a  critic  than  as  an  agent  of 
foreign  policy. 

In  his  matchless  sense  of  form,  in  the  perfect 
command  of  the  lingua  franca  that  a  classical 
education  teaches,  in  his  learning  and  deep 
respect  for  concrete  fact,  and  in  his  sense  of 


LORD    CURZON  111 

the  greatness  of  our  mission  in  the  world  no 
less  than  in  his  definite  political  views,  Lord 
Curzon  belongs  to  other  times.  He  is  a  Whig 
strayed  from  his  fellows,  hastening  weary 
but  open-minded  to  catch  up  to  his  age  and 
never  quite  succeeding.  He  has  no  future  in 
this  generation,  but  the  next  will  probably 
recognise  in  him  the  last  representative  of  a 
great  order,  and  will  be  inclined  to  put  him 
much  higher  than  this  generation  does. 


MR.  ASQUITH 


Mr.  and  Mrs.  Asquith. 


[P.p.  A. 


VII 
MR.  ASQUITH 

A  SOUND  Yorkshire  stock  gave  him 
health,  his  first  marriage  help,  his 
second  fashion  and  society,  but  Oxford 
made  Mr.  Asquith  what  he  has  been  and  still 
is.  Time  has  brought  him  no  changes  except 
of  political  rank,  and  no  real  rise  or  fall,  for 
power  is  in  the  man  himself,  not  in  his  office, 
and,  in  a  sense,  Mr.  Asquith  has  just  as  much 
(and  just  as  little)  power  now  as  when  he  was 
Prime  Minister. 

There  is  an  aristocracy  of  education  as  well 
as  of  birth.  Like  all  aristocracies,  it  is  dis- 
tracted by  feuds,  but  each  faction  has  its  own 
idiom  of  thought  and  expression,  repeating 
itself  in  its  adherents  like  a  Hapsburg  nose  or  a 
Cavendish  jaw,  a  pride  more  intense  than  any 
that  birth  knows,  an  imposing  fa9ade  that  it 
turns  towards  the  world  and  an  interior  that 
it  is  fain  to  keep  guarded  against  indiscretion. 
Mr.  Asquith  belonged  to  the  most  famous  of 
these  cliques  — ^the  Balliol  of  Jowett,  the  saintly 
worldling.     So,  too,  did  Lords  Curzon,  Grey, 

115 


116  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

and  Milner;  but  whereas  they  brought  to 
Oxford  characters  formed  by  other  influences, 
Asquith  brought  little  but  a  sound  constitu- 
tion and  a  white  sheet  of  paper ;  and  Balliol 
wrote  upon  it  nearly  the  whole  man. 

The  Prime  Minister  of  later  years  is  the 
former  Balliol  scholar,  looking  larger  and  feeling 
smaller ;  the  speeches  in  which  Mr.  Asquith 
knew  so  well  how  to  express  the  mind  of  a 
nation  in  stately  and  sonorous  phrase  are  the 
old  Latin  prose  exercises  retranslated  into 
English  and  furnished  with  modern  instances  ; 
the  working  of  democratic  institutions  is  the 
Oxford  examination  schools  again  with  eccen- 
tric examiners ;  distortion  and  exaggeration 
of  political  sentiment  are  howlers  grown  up, 
more  hateful  than  ever  to  the  scholar,  to  whom 
exactness,  balance,  avoidance  of  excess,  are 
the  master  intellectual  virtues.  Mr.  Asquith 
through  life  is  always  the  prize  scholar  in 
politics. 

The  scholar's  honour,  his  justice  of  heart 
and  mind,  and  his  proud  shyness  are  great 
possessions  to  carry  through  life,  but  they  are 
not  a  complete  equipment  for  politics.  He 
needs  an  inner  force  to  drive  and  create,  or 
some  strong  influence  from  without,  if  he  is  to 
mould  events.  Scholarship  tends  to  be  barren, 
or,  if  it  has  kittens,  it  usually  eats  them  out  of 


MR.   ASQUITH  117 


shyness.  It  makes  minds  like  clocks,  finished 
pieces  of  mechanism,  but  useless  till  they  are 
wound  up,  and  sometimes,  perversely,  it 
forgets  to  provide  a  keyhole.  These  last  are 
the  men  -some  of  them  of  unrivalled  mental 
attainments — who  are  never  afterwards  heard 
of.  With  Mr.  Asquith  politics  was  the  key- 
hole, but  others  did  the  winding — first  Glad- 
stone, then  Lord  Grey  and  Lord  Haldane, 
then  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  and  now,  they  say, 
sometimes  Mr.  Pringle. 

A  story  is  told  of  a  consultation  between 
counsel  at  the  close  of  the  Parnell  Commission, 
when  Mr.  Asquith  was  asked  by  Lord  Russell 
what  he  should  say  next  day.  Mr.  Asquith 
began  to  sketch  an  admirable  summary  of  the 
points  in  the  evidence,  when  Lord  Russell,  who 
had  good  reason  to  respect  his  intellectual 
calibre,  broke  out  impatiently,  "  Asquith,  I 
am  ashamed  of  you  ;  I  shall  talk  the  history  of 
Oireland."  The  spare  relevancy,  so  becoming 
to  the  scholar,  breaks  down  at  moments  of 
crisis.  In  genius  there  is  always  a  tangential 
quality.  The  lack  of  it  has  been  Mr.  Asquith' s 
great  limitation,  for  without  it  there  can  be  no 
creative  power,  and  he  has  none. 

When  Mr.  Asquith  moves  out  of  the  penum- 
bra of  Gladstone  he  is  a  Liberal  Imperialist  in 
close  association   with   Lord   Grey   and   Lord 


118  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

Haldane,  and  at  issue  both  with  the  official 
leader  of  the  party  and  with  the  great  majority 
of  the  followers  too.  That  Mr.  Asquith  should 
have  identified  himself  with  the  minority  in 
this  way  may  have  been  due  to  a  miscalcula- 
tion of  forces,  but  more  probably  was  the 
expression  of  an  instinctive  preference.  He  is 
constitutionally  averse  from  extremes,  and  the 
logic  of  left-wing  Liberalism,  even  if  he  had 
not  had  faith  in  the  essential  sanity  of  British 
Imperialism  abroad  as  an  instrument  of  liberty, 
doubtless  offended  a  nature  at  once  tolerant 
and  exact.  But  his  modern  relations  with 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  are  not  to  be  understood 
unless  it  is  remembered  that  he  was  for  long 
in  revolt  against  Sir  Henry  Campbell- Banner- 
man.  When  Sir  Henry  died,  Mr.  Asquith  was 
chosen  to  be  the  new  Prime  Minister,  but 
his  views  on  some  subjects,  and  still  more 
his  critical  and  unenthusiastic  temperament, 
divided  him  from  the  majority  of  his  party. 
He  was  the  titular  head,  but  he  held  office  like 
a  constitutional  monarch  by  following  his  Prime 
Minister — in  this  case  Mr.  Lloyd  George. 

Thus  early  was  formed  the  habit  which  made 
him  a  failure  in  war — ^the  habit  of  regarding 
his  office  as  that  of  an  arbitrator,  whose  chief 
duty  was  to  compose  differences  and  maintain 
unity  within  the  party.     He  did  not  impose 


MR.   ASQUITH  119 


his  own  will  on  the  Cabinet,  but  was  the 
resultant  of  forces  within  it.  In  the  sham 
fights  of  party  warfare,  that  was  well  enough  ; 
but,  when  real  war  came,  the  nation  insisted 
on  a  leader,  not  on  a  chairman  of  committees, 
and  it  got  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  who  had  just  the 
qualities  that  Mr.  Asquith  had  not.  It  would 
be  unfair  not  to  add  that  on  Mr.  Asquith  fell 
the  responsibility  of  war  for  its  first  and  longer 
half,  and  that  he  sustained  the  burden,  if  not 
with  success,  at  any  rate  with  singular  dignity 
and  with  the  most  sensitive  regard  for  national 
honour.  There  are  some  speeches  of  Mr. 
Asquith' s  made  towards  the  beginning  of  the 
war  that  every  Englishman  would  take  an 
oath  upon,  as  on  a  Bible,  so  pure  is  their 
patriotism,  so  compact  of  justice  their  expres- 
sion. He  was  not  leading ;  but  sometimes  he 
interpreted  as  no  one  has  done  before  or  since. 
It  would  be  one  of  the  paradoxes  of  politics, 
were  not  this  sort  of  thing  always  happening, 
that  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  twelve  years  ago  the 
hope  of  the  stern  unbending  Radicals,  should 
now  be  the  mediator  and  compromiser,  and 
Mr.  Asquith  the  old  Liberal  Leaguer,  the  leader 
of  the  forlorn  hopes  of  the  old  official  Liberalism. 
And  the  paradox  is  more  violent  still  when  it  is 
remembered  that  Mr.  Lloyd  George  was  the 
chief  enemy  of  entanglement  in  the  affairs  of 


120  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Europe  almost  up  to  the  last.  In  1914  there 
were  many  subjects  of  disagreement  between 
them,  and  they  sat  side  by  side  ;  now  there 
are  few  and  they  sit  in  opposition.  Mr. 
Asquith  is  singularly  free  from  the  vices  of 
the  mean  and  ungenerous  nature.  He  forgives 
easily,  at  any  rate  he  would  if  left  to  himself, 
and  he  never  allows  personal  ambition  to  stand 
between  him  and  the  sun  of  duty  whose 
warmth  he  so  enjoys.  Yet  he  is  leader  of  the 
Opposition  when,  on  nine  subjects  out  of  ten, 
his  convictions  are  on  the  Ministerial  side. 
He  does  it  badly  in  consequence.  Why  should 
they  have  changed  the  places  which  ten  years 
ago  everyone  would  have  predicted  that  they 
would  now  have  been  occupying  in  a  Coali- 
tion ?  Mainly  because  Conservatism  has  lived 
for  generations  on  its  Radical  recruits,  but 
cannot  get  on  with  the  Whigs,  however  close 
their  views  may  be. 

Mr.  Asquith  used  to  be  reproached  with 
being  a  trimmer.  Perhaps  he  is,  in  tactics  ; 
but  his  convictions  are  viscous  rather  than 
fluid,  and  he  has  the  greatest  difficulty  in 
modifying  them.  His  Irish  policy,  for  example, 
is  a  mere  ghost  of  the  Glads tonian  controversies 
and  stands  in  no  sort  of  relation  with  changed 
political  conditions.  He  cannot  turn  a  political 
position,  and  the  strange  spectacle  is  witnessed 


MR.   ASQUITH  121 


of  a  statesman  constitutionally  averse  from 
extremes  drawing  out  the  Gladstonian  ideas 
on  Ireland  to  impossible  lengths  rather  than 
reconstruct  a  new  policy  of  reform  out  of  the 
old  elements.  His  politics  are  too  concerned 
with  forms,  not  enough  with  realities.  He 
occupies,  in  fact,  much  the  same  relation  to 
Progressive  forces  as  the  Cecils  to  those  of 
Conservatism ;  like  theirs,  all  his  instincts  are 
aristocratic,  though,  in  his  case,  it  is  an  aris- 
tocracy of  mind.  His  obstinacy,  his  rigid 
intellectual  honesty,  and  his  strict  truthfulness 
have  never  been  more  conspicuous  than  since 
his  arrival  in  the  present  Parliament ;  and, 
in  some  ways,  he  seems  a  more  admirable 
figure  on  the  front  Opposition  bench  now, 
squeezed  in  between  the  unyielding  Mr.  Adam- 
son  and  the  more  elastic  Mr.  Hogge,  than  when 
he  was  Prime  Minister.  Then  he  recited  prize 
compositions  from  a  rostrum  of  Wait  and  See  ; 
now  he  is  in  a  false  position  on  the  floor,  but 
maintains,  by  his  very  ineffectiveness  as  a 
party  leader,  his  reputation  for  honesty. 

He  does  not  like  the  present  House,  nor  does 
it  like  him,  and  one  reason  is  that  he  has  never 
made  a  serious  attempt  to  understand  it. 
When  Mr.  Balfour  came  back  after  his  defeat 
in  1906,  his  first  speech  in  a  House  that  for  the 
most  part  knew  his  name  only  was  a  failure. 


122  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

and  he  sat  down  for  some  months  of  silence  to 
learn  its  peculiarities.  Mr.  Asquith  has  never 
paid  this  House  that  compliment,  but  if  he 
did,  he  would  have  a  similar  reward  to  Balfour's. 
Better  still  would  it  have  been  if  Mr.  Asquith 
had  not  sat  on  the  Liberal  front  Opposition 
bench,  but  on  the  cross-benches,  where  his 
influence  would  have  been  greater  and  he 
could  have  been  wholly  himself.  And  he  would 
have  been  nearer  to  the  Cecil  group,  an  alliance 
with  whom  seems  to  be  the  natural  destiny  of 
the  variety  of  Liberalism  for  which  Mr.  Asquith 
stands.  His  hatred  for  the  new  bureaucracy, 
his  genuine  zeal  for  economy,  his  individualism, 
are  all  points  of  contact  with  the  group.  Their 
philosophy  of  politics  is  much  the  same,  and 
their  specific  differences  are  falling  off,  one 
after  the  other,  for  lack  of  nourishment. 

It  is  usual  nowadays  to  shed  tears  over 
Mr.  Asquith,  and  even  to  read  moral  sermons 
over  his  career.  But  there  is  no  obvious  reason 
for  treating  him  like  a  Decline  and  Fall.  His 
success  has  not  been  below  his  abilities,  and  a 
man  who  was  at  the  head  of  affairs  in  the  first 
half  of  the  war,  whatever  his  faults  may  have 
been,  may  one  day  walk  with  Pitt  in  Elysium. 
The  sensitiveness  and  reserve  with  which  he 
himself  would  wish  to  hide  the  life  that  is 
his  own  is  worthy  of  admiration  and  ought  to 


MR.   ASQUITH  123 


have  been  respected  more  than  it  has  been. 
Intellectual  men  all  have  their  sharp  reactions, 
and  it  is  the  chief  fault  in  his  philosophy  that 
it  gives  too  much  room  in  life  to  pure  intellect, 
and  so  makes  for  a  stronger  reaction  which  has 
sometimes  puzzled  his  more  straight-laced 
admirers.  But  in  public  affairs  his  personal 
character  has  often  shown  nobility,  and  has 
always  been  pure  from  the  grosser  and  meaner 
motives. 


MR.    BONAR    LAW 


Mr.  Bonar  Law  (with  Lord  Carson). 


VIII 
MR.    BONAR   LAW 

OH,  sheer  patient  hulk  of  the  British 
Conservative  Party,  always  aground 
under  its  home-bred  captains,  and 
bumping  its  invulnerable  ribs  against  the 
flowing  tide,  wind  and  water  tight  only  under 
borrowed  captains  and  crews  ! 

First  it  is  Disraeli,  the  Radical  ^  from  the 
East,  who  gets  the  stranded  craft  afloat,  and 
navigates  it  into  strange  waters  in  quest  of 
the  Conservative  working-man ;  then  the  ex- 
Radical,  Joseph  Chamberlain,  rediscovering 
the  British  Empire ;  and  after  him  Mr.  Bonar 
Law,  iidus  Achates  to  the  reputed  worst  Radical 
of  them  all,  and  brought  all  the  way  from 
Canada  to  take  command  of  the  ship.     For 

1  Radical  throughout  these  essays  is  used  in  the  sense  that 
the  word  has  in  England,  not  in  America.  In  America,  a 
Radical  is  a  Social  Revolutionary,  who  manages  to  keep  out 
of  gaol  only  by  calling  himself  a  Liberal.  But  in  England, 
Radical  was  (and  still  is)  a  title  of  honour  which  the  left 
wing  of  Liberals  like  to  assume  to  themselves.  He  is  a  man 
who  rejects,  for  good  and  for  evil,  the  Whig  traditions  of  the 
Liberal  Party  ;  and  on  that  account  has  often  found  it  easier 
to  co-operate  with  the  Conservatives  than  with  the  official 
Liberals. 

127 


128  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Mr.  Bonar  Law,  too,  though  a  genuine  Con- 
servative and  attached  to  the  party  in  a  sense 
in  which  Disraeh  and  Chamberlain  never  were, 
is  still  not  native  to  it.  He  never  warmed  a 
proprietorial  back  at  the  arae  et  foci  of  the 
party,  and  in  his  aloofness  from  its  older 
traditions  he  might  still  be  in  Canada.  By 
comparison  with  Lord  Long,  or  even  with 
Mr.  Austen  Chamberlain,  he  is  the  newest  of 
men,  and  that  in  a  party  which  still  likes  to 
think  of  itself  as  of  the  soil,  racy.  But 
though  the  latest  to  be  imposed,  his  authority, 
until  his  breakdown  at  the  beginning  ^of  1921, 
was  never  seriously  challenged.  The  old  stock 
patiently  bears  the  fruit  of  its  latest  graft 
miraturque  novas  frondes  et  non  sua  poma — 

Thus  pears  and  quinces  from  the  crabtree  come ; 
And  thus  the  ruddy  cornel  bears  the  plum. 

Yet  one  recognises  how  inevitable,  after  all, 
the  succession  in  leadership  was  from  Disraeli 
to  Bonar  Law.  Disraeli  found  the  Tories  the 
party  of  a  faction  humiliated  with  defeat,  torn 
with  secession,  and  destined,  so  it  seemed,  to 
an  early  and  unhonoured  death.  He  made  it 
once  more  a  living  and  national  party,  and 
found  for  it  millions  of  unsuspected  allies  in 
the  electorate,  and  all  that  on  the  condition 
which  seemed  to  many  at  the  time  the  merest 


MR.    BONAR    LAW  129 

trifle — ^that  it  ceased  to  be  a  Tory  and  became 
the    Conservative    Party.     When,    after    the 
CeciHan  interregnum,  Mr.  Joseph  Chamberlain 
became    a  member  of  the  party,   it  was  no 
longer  Conservative  and  had  become  Unionist, 
and  again  the  change  of  name  concealed  a 
revolution.     The  new  party  became  a  party  of 
advanced  social  reform  ;  the  breath  of  romance 
which  Disraeli  had  found  on  the  Hindu  Kush, 
Chamberlain    rediscovered    in    the    illimitable 
veld,  and  in  a  material  age  it  was  none  the  less 
refreshing  to  most  people  for  blowing  across  a 
gold  reef;    and  finally  there  came  the  Tariff 
Reform  proposals,  uniting  the  squirearchy  of 
the  country  and  the  factory,  and  proposing  to 
rewrite  Conservatism  in  the  terms  of  a  new 
political  economy  and  of  a  new  Imperial  unity. 
Mr.  Chamberlain  had  a  genius  for  friendship, 
and  no  one  was  ever  more  loyal  to  colleagues 
and  chief  than  he.     Of  a  warmer  and  more 
impetuous  nature,  he  was  certainly  fonder  of 
Mr.   Balfour   than   Mr.   Balfour   was   of  him. 
But  he  captured  the  imagination  of  the  party 
as  Disraeli  had  done  before  him,  and  as  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  captured  that  of  the  Liberals 
later,  and  it  was  inevitable  that  the  lieutenant 
should  become  the  real  leader  of  the  party. 
Before  the  hot  breath  of  the  new  Protection, 
coming  as  from  the  mouth  of  a  furnace,  the 
9 


130  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

influence  of  Mr.  Balfour  in  the  party  counsels 
shrivelled  and  fell.  It  was  now  that  Mr.  Bonar 
Law  came  into  prominence.  He  entered  Parlia- 
ment in  the  khaki  election  of  1900,  and  when 
the  Tariff  Reform  controversy  was  joined  he 
found  himself  in  a  temperature  that  exactly 
suited  him.  Mr.  Chamberlain  became  a  Tariff 
Reformer  as  it  were  by  accident,  because  he 
was  keen  on  Imperial  union.  Mr.  Bonar  Law 
seems  to  have  been  born  one.  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain invented  his  arguments  to  illustrate  his 
theory,  but  with  Mr.  Law  figures  and  theory 
had  grown  up  together  inextricably  inter- 
twined. Very  soon  he  was  known  as  the  only 
man  who  could  argue  the  case  really  well,  and 
the  waistcoat  pocket  from  which  he  drew  the 
relevant  figures  and  the  damaging  quotation 
became  a  legendary  dungeon  of  Tariff  Reform 
lore. 

It  is  easy  to  under- estimate  the  highly 
specialised  gifts  that  Mr.  Bonar  Law  revealed 
at  this  time,  and  doubtless  at  any  other  time 
they  would  have  carried  him  nothing  like  so 
far.  English  politics  from  1903  onwards  were 
one  vast  sea  of  statistics,  on  which  Mr.  Bonar 
Law  bobbed  up  and  down  like  a  cork,  and  alone 
never  got  a  ducking.  But  his  opportune 
ability  to  handle  figures  was  the  sign,  not  the 
whole,  of  his  power.     He  is  sometimes  taken  as 


MR.    BONAR    LAW  131 

the  representative  business  man  in  politics. 
Nothing  of  the  kind,  for  the  typical  modern 
business  man  is  a  man  either  of  powerful 
imagination  or  of  wishy-washy  sentiment,  and 
he  has  neither.  He  stands  rather  for  the 
Northern  passion  for  argument.  In  the  South 
people  never  argue  with  each  other ;  they  are 
content  to  say  what  they  think,  to  diffuse  the 
appropriate  temperamental  aura  about  what 
they  say,  and  if  that  does  not  persuade  they 
give  it  up.  But  in  the  North  argumentation 
is  a  passion.  Opinions  really  are  changed  by 
the  turning  and  twisting  of  words,  and  an 
argument  with  which  a  man  disagrees  is  not 
something  to  shrug  his  shoulders  at,  but  to  hit 
on  the  head  if  he  can.  It  is  the  difference 
between  an  evangelical  and  a  ceremonial 
religion. 

This  passion  for  argumentation  is  the  per- 
manent and  distinguishing  quality  in  Mr. 
Bonar  Law.  When  he  comes  into  the  House, 
he  looks  the  plain,  kind-hearted,  decent  man, 
dressed  as  though  for  kirk.  The  eyes  are  wide 
open  and  shy  ;  the  manner,  when  his  critics 
are  talking,  is  the  blend  of  deference  and  resig- 
nation with  which  people  listen  to  a  sermon. 
But  when  he  rises  to  reply  one  becomes  con- 
scious of  ability  of  a  rare  and  curious  kind. 
He  cannot  create  an  atmosphere,  he  has  no 


132  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

saliences  of  phrase,  his  gestures  are  undis- 
tinguished, and  the  voice  is  thin,  dull,  and 
before  his  resignation  a  little  indistinct  and  low. 
But  if  you  regard  argument  as  the  weaving  of  an 
intricate  pattern,  there  is  no  one  in  the  House 
to  approach  him  for  skill.  You  feel  when  he 
rises  that  he  can  never  get  under  your  rhetorical 
guard,  and  then  suddenly  the  net  is  round  you, 
and  you  are  caught  in  meshes  of  argumentation 
so  fine  that  you  hardly  know  that  they  are 
there  until  you  feel  yourself  powerless.  Beware 
of  the  retiarius. 

Conservative  party  politics  in  the  last  half- 
generation  must  be  read  as  a  long  duel — often 
fought  unconsciously  in  sleep  or  waking  dreams 
— between  the  Balfourians  and  Chamberlain- 
ites,  between  those  for  whom  the  chief  function 
of  Conservatism  is  criticism  and  resistance  to 
change,  and  those  who  have  absorbed  the 
Radical  innovating  spirit  which  Disraeli  intro- 
duced and  Chamberlain  strengthened,  and 
who  are  never  satisfied  unless  the  party  has 
reform  windmills  of  its  own  to  tilt  at ;  between 
those  who  love  tradition,  quietness,  and  the 
peaceful  broad  acres  of  national  life,  and  on 
the  other  hand  the  crusaders,  the  propagan- 
dists, the  modernists,  the  industrialists  of  the 
party.  For  the  crisis  between  the  compromising 
hedgers  and  the  last- ditchers  in  the  controversies 


MR.    BONAR    LAW  133 

of  1911,  which  made  Mr.  Bonar  Law  the  Leader 
of  the  Opposition,  was  a  clash  not  only 
between  policies,  but  of  temperaments,  and  it 
was  continuous  along  the  lines  of  cleavage 
which  began  with  Disraeli  and  deepened  with 
Chamberlain.  Mr.  Bonar  Law  was  selected  to 
lead  because  he  had  fewer  enemies  than  either 
Mr.  Austen  Chamberlain  or  Mr.  Long.  At  the 
time  the  party  was  surprised  at  the  choice  and 
inclined  to  be  apologetic.  But  it  chose  more 
wisely  than  it  knew. 

It  is  a  tempting  speculation  what  might  have 
happened  had  George  Wyndham  lived.  He 
was  a  man  who,  if  he  had  kept  his  health  and 
his  application,  could  have  bridged  the  gulf 
between  the  old  and  the  new  in  the  Conserva- 
tive Party,  who  united  some  of  the  reformer's 
ardour  with  respect  for  the  humane  and 
civilised  traditions  of  the  party,  and  who, 
above  all,  had  the  gift  of  sympathy  with 
Ireland,  and  not  with  the  Scottish  end  of  it 
alone.  Mr.  Bonar  Law  has  always  had  the 
good  fortune  of  timeliness,  not  only  in  the 
moment  when  he  entered  politics,  but  also  in 
the  moment  of  his  election  to  the  leadership. 
A  few  years  later  and  the  crest  of  the  enthusi- 
asm which  brought  him  to  the  fore  would  have 
been  the  trough.  On  the  Tariff  Reform  issue 
Balfour  was  right,  and  Chamberlain  and  his 


134  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

successors  were  wrong ;  the  frontal  attack  on 
Free  Trade  was  tactically  wrong,  and  the 
subtle  methods  of  Balfour  had  a  better  chance 
of  success.  Perhaps  but  for  the  Tariff  Reform 
issue  Mr.  Balfour  might  have  been  strong 
enough  to  keep  Wyndham.  Ireland  might 
have  been  comfortably  settled  before  the  war, 
and  alliance  between  the  Conservative  Party 
and  Ulster  might  have  been  less  crippling.  It 
is  on  Ireland  that  Mr.  Bonar  Law  reveals  his 
defects  most  unmistakably.  There  is  a  narrow 
provinciality,  a  certain  coarse  grain  of  prejudice 
when  he  speaks  about  Ireland  that  is  not  in 
accord  with  the  better  traditions  of  the  Con- 
servative Party.  Yet  if  one  compares  him 
with  Balfour  in  this  respect,  it  is  not  to  his 
disauvantage.  Bonar  Law  is  at  any  rate 
sincere  on  Ireland ;  what's  bred  in  the  bone 
comes  out  in  the  flesh ;  and  he  never  aban- 
doned a  conviction  or  a  friend.  Mr.  Balfour, 
when  he  threw  over  Wyndham,  certainly  did 
the  one,  and  perhaps  did  both. 

It  is  sometimes  regarded  as  one  of  the 
paradoxes  of  politics  that  Mr.  Bonar  Law,  who 
came  into  power  in  the  political  crisis  caused 
by  Mr.  Lloyd  George's  turbulent  period  as 
second-in-command  under  Mr.  Asquith,  should 
have  become  so  close  a  friend.  In  reality  the 
two  have  a  great  deal  in  common,  even  apart 


MR.    BONAR    LAW  135 

from  the  immediate  programme  of  the  CoaHtion 
Party.  Both  represent  in  their  old  parties  the 
Radical  disruptive  spirit ;  both  were  rebels 
against  the  passive  distinction  and  sterile 
humanities  of  their  old  chiefs  ;  both  had  out- 
grown the  old  party  formulce  and  neither  would 
ever  have  been  happy  in  the  strait-waistcoat 
of  the  old  two-party  system.  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  never  was  a  Gladstonian  Home  Ruler, 
never  a  Cobdenite  Liberal.  Similarly  for  Mr. 
Bonar  Law  a  great  part  of  Conservatism  is  a 
closed  book.  Even  when  they  differ,  they  are 
complements,  the  opposites  that  attract.  To 
an  impressionist  like  Mr,  Lloyd  George,  the 
pre-Raphaelite  argumentation  of  Mr.  Bonar 
Law  was  invaluable  in  a  leader  of  the  House. 
Invaluable,  too,  are  the  simple  honesty  of  Mr. 
Bonar  Law's  character,  his  directness,  and  his 
unswerving  loyalty. 

Mr.  Lloyd  George  has  done  much  for  the 
politics  of  his  lieutenant.  Apart  from  his 
passion  for  Tariff  Reform  and  his  very  unhelp- 
ful views  about  Ireland,  Mr.  Bonar  Law  had 
no  political  ideas  of  his  own.  But  he  had  on 
a  great  many  subjects  of  domestic  policy  an 
open  mind,  and  into  it  Mr.  Lloyd  George  put 
many  new  and  productive  thoughts.  You  may 
think  as  poorly  as  you  will  about  the  work  of 
the    Coalition,    but    imagine    undiluted    Con- 


136  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

servatives  running  the  policy  of  the  country 
since  the  war,  and  the  storms  through  which  we 
have  gone  would  seem  a  haven  of  rest  compared 
with  the  turmoil  that  we  might  have  had.  Mr. 
Bonar  Law,  too,  has  done  service  to  his  chief. 
But  for  his  assistance  at  the  end  of  1916,  Mr. 
Asquith  would  have  remained  in  power,  and 
the  war  would  have  been  prolonged  or  lost. 
It  was  Mr.  Bonar  Law,  again,  who  made  the 
alliance  between  the  Conservatives  and  the 
Coalition  Liberals  possible,  and  when  his 
health  broke  down,  the  emotion  of  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  in  announcing  the  temporary  retire- 
ment of  his  Conservative  colleague  was  not 
histrionical,  but  proof  of  a  very  sincere  personal 
friendship.  Mr.  Lloyd  George  knew  that  the 
departure  of  Mr.  Bonar  Law  inevitably  meant 
the  widening  of  the  breach  between  the  two 
wings  of  the  Coalitionists,  and  his  anticipations 
are  being  fulfilled.  The  breach,  which  sooner 
or  later  seems  certain,  is,  perhaps,  as  well  for 
Mr.  Lloyd  George,  for  valuable  as  was  Mr. 
Bonar  Law's  personal  influence  with  the  Con- 
servatives, the  alliance  between  them  was  in 
many  respects  unequal.  Mr.  Bonar  Law 
brought  no  ideas  into  the  common  stock,  and 
pinioned  the  flight  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George's 
genius — perhaps  inflicted  an  irreparable  injury 
on  his  reputation.     And  yet  one  doubts  whether 


MR.    BONAR    LAW  137 

the  stories  of  disagreement  between  the  two 
had  any  real  foundation.  No  one  can  be 
certain  which  of  the  rival  set  of  views  within 
the  Coalitionist  party  will  ultimately  leaven 
the  lump.  But  had  Mr.  Bonar  Law  not  left 
pohtics,  one  might  safely  have  hazarded  a 
prediction.  If  and  when  the  Conservative 
Party  broke  away  from  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  it 
would  no  longer  have  been  under  the  lead  of 
Mr.  Bonar  Law  ;  and  should  the  Prime  Minister, 
as  so  many  expect,  move  to  the  Left  in  politics, 
Mr.  Bonar  Law  would  still  have  been  found  at 
his  side,  faithful  and  loyal  always — always 
helpful  in  the  minor  tactics,  hampering  in  the 
larger  strategy  of  politics. 


MR.   WINSTON 
CHURCHILL 


[L.N.A. 


Mr.  Winston  Churchill. 


XI 

MR.    WINSTON   CHURCHILL 

SOME  men  hang  themselves  on  their 
pohtics,  others  hang  their  poHtics  on 
themselves,  and  these  need  to  be  stout 
pegs,  well  screwed  into  the  scheme  of  things, 
as  indeed  Mr.  Churchill  is.  He  manages  it  very 
well.  His  first  party  will  still  have  no  good 
said  of  him,  his  second  believes  him  to  be 
hankering  after  his  first  love,  and  latterly  he 
has  been  advertising  for  a  new  Centre  Party 
which  is  to  combine  the  charms  of  the  other 
two.  But  even  if  this  third  match  came  off 
and  then  turned  out  ill,  Mr.  Churchill  would 
not  be  greatly  embarrassed,  for  wherever  he  is 
there  is  his  party. 

That  is  not  to  say  that  he  is  unprincipled  or 
self-seeking.  On  the  contrary,  he  has  a  very 
lofty  conception  of  duty  in  public  affairs,  and 
there  is  high  authority  for  the  view  that  to  be 
true  to  oneself  is  to  be  false  to  no  one  else.  In 
pohtics  there  is  often  more  falseness,  and  even 
treachery,  in  consistency  than  in  change,  and 
of  Mr.  Churchill  almost  alone  among  politicians 

141 


142  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

it  may  truthfully  be  said  that  he  is  always 
candid,  always  himself,  in  his  public  utterances. 
Even  if  it  were  not  part  of  his  public  conscience, 
why  should  he  not  be  when  to  be  himself  is  to 
be  so  variably  interesting  ?  In  Lancashire, 
a  saying  of  his  used  to  be  quoted  that  the 
Churchills  die  young,  the  inference  being 
that  Mr.  Churchill  changed  sides  because  he 
recognised  at  the  beginning  of  the  century 
that  the  Liberals  were  in  for  a  long  lease  of 
power.  That  was  certainly  the  Conservative 
view  of  the  matter,  but  Mr.  Churchill's  faults 
are  those  of  an  impetuous  not  of  a  calculating 
nature,  and  the  more  likely  explanation  of  his 
defection  was  some  resemblance,  real  but 
exaggerated  by  the  son's  loyalty,  between  the 
politics  of  that  time  and  of  the  period  of  his 
father's  resignation. 

That  the  son  is  intensely  loyal  to  his  father's 
memory  we  know  from  one  of  the  best  political 
biographies  in  the  language,  and  it  was  natural, 
entering  politics  so  young  and  without  much 
wardrobe  of  his  own,  that  he  should  use  his 
father's  old  suits — his  zeal  for  economy  and 
fiscal  purity  (what  repelled  him  most  of 
Protection  was  always  its  temptations  to 
political  corruption)  and  his  dislike  of  certain 
forms  of  Imperialism.  Already  in  South  Africa 
he  had  given  great   offence  by   pleading  for 


MR.    WINSTON    CHURCHILL  143 

conciliation  with  the  beaten  but  still  resisting 
Boers.  Having  elected  to  go  over  to  the 
Liberals,  the  zeal  of  the  convert  followed  as  a 
matter  of  course.  Mr.  Churchill  does  nothing 
by  halves.  Certainly,  no  one  expressed  the 
dominant  creed  of  1906  with  such  fervour  of 
apparent  conviction,  and  thus  early  was  put 
in  pickle  the  rod  that  was  used  so  bitterly  in 
the  middle  of  the  war.  From  1906  to  1910 
Mr.  Churchill  was  very  thick  with  Mr.  Lloyd 
George,  and  Mr.  Churchill  made  some  con- 
tributions of  his  own — notably  the  Labour 
Exchanges — to  the  "  social  policy  "  of  those 
days. 

In  everything  he  does  or  says  there  has 
always  been  a  certain  amplitude.  He  is  the 
only  subaltern  who  ever  had  the  hardihood  to 
have  views  of  his  own  on  the  North- West 
Frontier,  and  the  literary  gift  to  make  them 
interesting.  Only  a  few  years  after  this  first 
book  of  his  he  was  criticising  Lord  Kitchener 
for  his  conduct  of  the  Sudan  campaign.  He 
never  forgets  that  he  is  the  descendant  of  our 
only  military  strategist,  and  he  believes  in 
hereditary  missions  and  inherited  gifts.  He  has 
a  finely  dramatic  sense,  and  at  one  time  he  had 
the  John  Burns  gift  of  always  being  about 
whenever  anything  was  to  be  done  in  character. 
He  escapes  from  a  Boer  prison  and  the  thing 


144  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

becomes  an  Odyssey  ;  there  is  a  fight  with 
some  Russian  anarchists  in  a  back  street,  and 
he  makes  it  a  veritable  siege  of  Lille — guns, 
oaths,  bravura  complete.  Physically  brave,  he 
loves  danger  for  its  romance,  while  not  forgetting 
that  real  adventure  with  a  dash  of  colour  is  as 
good  as  a  sky-sign  advertisement. 

And  yet  with  this  tendency  to  the  theatrical 
there  goes  a  rich  vein  of  common  sense,  and  his 
natural  genius  is  fortified  by  an  amazing  power 
of   application    and    hard    work.     He   can   be 
*' viewy"  about  what  does  not  matter,  but  he 
never  leaves  in  the  air  an  opinion  seriously 
held,  without  having  a  host  of  arguments  and 
facts  ready  to  support  it  on  the  flanks.     He  is 
vain  but  not  conceited,  and  with  regard  to  his 
own   work   keenly   conscientious.     Nothing  is 
more  to  his  credit  than  the  development  of  his 
power  in  debate.     He  took  great  risks  when  he 
entered  on  a  political  career,  for  his  copiousness 
of  expression  and  fecundity  of  ideas  did  not 
guarantee  him  success  on  the  platform,  or  in 
debate.     The  voice  is  harsh,  with  some  slight 
impediment,  and,  like  many  people  who  excel, 
he  is  not  free  from  nervousness.     The  perfect 
logical   architecture,    the   happy    phrase    and 
rich   formal   rhetoric   have   always    been   his, 
but  at  first  they  were  the  virtues  of  the  man  of 
letters   rather  than   the   orator.     He    always 


MR.    WINSTON    CHURCHILL  145 

carried  heavy  guns,  but  they  were  not  mobile. 
Now  he  is  one  of  the  best  of  debaters.  He 
can  create  an  atmosphere,  he  is  a  master  of 
dangerous  retort,  and  always  there  is  the  sense 
of  power  and  mastery.  It  is  the  result  of 
sheer  hard  work  and  of  a  power  of  self-criticism 
with  which  he  is  not  usually  credited. 

When  the  father*s  clothes,  in  spite  of  repeated 
dyeing,  had  to  be  discarded,  he  emerges  as  a 
very  creditable  Whig,  and  that  angered  the 
Tories  the  more,  for  they  have  always  hated 
Whigs  more  than  Radicals.  At  the  Admiralty 
he  withstood  the  economists  and  founded  a 
Naval  General  Staff  (a  very  poor  one),  and  it 
was  due  to  one  of  his  alert  decisions  that  the 
Fleet  was  fully  mobilised  at  the  outbreak  of 
war.  He  has  great  qualities  as  an  adminis- 
trator, but  they  are  hardly  those  which  one 
would  have  expected  of  him.  It  would  not 
have  surprised  anybody  to  find  one  so 
irreverent  of  authority,  so  original  in  concep- 
tion, and  so  daring  in  execution  starting  new 
ideas  and  running  them  to  death.  Nothing  of 
the  kind.  He  is  industrious  and  makes  himself 
master  of  detail,  he  balances  judiciously  and 
more  often  than  not  declines  to  the  conven- 
tional. 

One  could  imagine  a  man  of  Mr.  Churchill's 
great  intellectual  power  carrying  out  reforms 
10 


146  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

at  the  Admiralty  that  would  have  made  the 
early  naval  history  of  the  war  a  very  different 
thing,  for  the  Navy  was  ready  for  war  in  every- 
thing but  that  which  mattered  most,  the  habit 
of  independent  and  unconventional  thought, 
and  this  he  might  have  supplied.  At  the  War 
Office  at  the  end  of  the  war  the  same  oppor-  ^ 
tunity  seemed  to  offer,  and  again  there  is  the 
same  disappointment.  There  is  tremendous 
efficiency  and  business  ability,  and  feats  of 
organisation  are  accomplished,  but  of  the  man 
himself,  with  his  sheer  intellectual  power  and 
his  fertility  of  ideas,  there  is  no  sign.  It  may 
be  after  all  that  the  fabric  of  his  thinking 
is  conventional,  and  only  its  colouring  and 
expression  are  original ;  or  it  may  be  that  his 
mind  does  not  gear  readily  to  other  minds, 
and  that  he  must  either  think  and  act  inde- 
pendently for  himself,  or  when  that  is  impos- 
sible tumefy  the  conventions. 

The  second  is  probably  the  true  explanation 
for  what,  after  all,  is  the  salient  fact  in  Mr. 
Churchill's  career,  that  he  is  always  raising 
expectations  and  disappointing  them,  and  that 
each  disappointment  leaves  one  not  a  whit 
less  expectant  than  before.  It  covers,  too, 
the  tragedies  of  Antwerp  and  Gallipoli.  As 
strategical  conceptions  they  were  the  best  on 
either  side  in  the  war,  and  worthy  of  Blenheim, 


MR.    WINSTON    CHURCHILL  147 

The  first  fastened  on  the  great  blunder  of 
German  strategy  that  in  its  absurd  confidence 
of  ending  the  war  on  the  West  in  six  weeks  it 
had  left  this  right  flank  uncovered.  What  else 
were  the  agonies  of  Passchendaele  three  years 
later  but  the  foul  nightmare  of  this  lost 
strategic  opportunity  ?  The  Dardanelles 
enterprise,  again,  would,  had  it  succeeded, 
have  saved  Russia,  hastened  the  collapse  of 
Austria  by  two  years,  and  reduced  the  cam- 
paigns in  Turkey  to  the  dimensions  of  a  small 
war.  To  one  who  sees  these  things  in  a  flash, 
as  Mr.  Churchill  did,  the  delays  of  persuasion 
are  a  torture.  At  Antwerp  it  was  necessary 
to  act  precipitately  or  not  at  all,  but  in  the 
Dardanelles  delay  would  have  done  no  harm, 
and  in  an  evil  hour  he  committed  himself  to  a 
purely  naval  attack. 

Yet  Churchill  was  right  in  wanting  to  renew 
the  attack  next  day,  for  it  would  have  suc- 
ceeded, as  we  now  know,  and  the  younger 
naval  men  were  with  him  right  to  the  end  of 
the  disastrous  enterprise.  In  the  land  cam- 
paign in  Gallipoli  the  luck  was  even  more 
peevishly  perverse.  When  the  last  attempt 
to  capture  the  Peninsula  was  made  by  the 
landing  at  Suvla,  there  were  in  front  of  the 
British  divisions  the  merest  handful  of  Turkish 
irregulars.     The  nearest  Turkish  regulars,  who 


148  POLITICAL    PROFILES 

were  not  engaged,  were  under  one  Suleiman, 
more  than  fifty  miles  away  when  the  landing 
took  place.  The  story  (based  on  Turkish 
authority)  is  that  Suleiman  at  once  set  out  on 
the  march,  and  that  his  van  reached  the  hills 
above  the  plain  and  sank  down  there  exhausted, 
about  the  same  time  that  Sir  Ian  Hamilton 
was  reproaching  General  Stopford  for  two 
wasted  days.  In  this  frightful  cross-purposing 
of  precipitation  and  delay,  of  heroism,  ill-luck, 
and  victory  missed  by  hours  and  yards,  the 
gentlest  lost  their  tempers,  and  it  looked  as 
though  Churchill's  career  was  irretrievably 
ruined.  But,  more  fortunate  than  Alcibiades 
after  his  Sicilian  expedition,  he  always  had  a 
band  of  friends  to  do  him  justice,  and  among 
them  was  the  Prime  Minister.  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  himself  was  an  Easterner,  though  not 
identified  with  the  Dardanelles  enterprise,  and 
he  knew  that  but  for  the  grace  of  God  he 
might  himself  have  been  in  the  tumbril.  But 
Mr.  Lloyd  George,  though  an  Easterner  always, 
preferred  the  Balkan  solution,  and  it  was  in 
fact  the  decision  to  land  men  at  Salonica  that 
made  the  abandonment  of  the  Gallipoli  enter- 
prise inevitable.  The  history  of  the  alternate 
attraction  and  repulsion  of  these  two  men  for 
each  other  would  make  an  instructive  chapter 
of    political    psychology.     Thrice    they    have 


MR.   WINSTON    CHURCHILL  149 

started  as  though  on  parallel  lines,  and  each 
time  they  insensibly  diverged  until  a  rupture 
was  only  to  be  avoided  by  making  another 
start.  Twice  it  has  been  avoided  so  ;  the  third 
time  it  may  be  impossible. 

Mr.  Churchill  belongs  to  no  school  of  politics, 
and  will  not  found  one,  and  he  has  ceased  even 
to  be  the  revenant  of  the  old  Fourth  Party. 
But  he  will  never  be  out  of  politics  for  long, 
for  he  is  even  more  dangerous  as  an  enemy  than 
as  a  friend.  He  has  latterly  become  steadily 
more  Conservative,  less  from  conviction  than 
from  the  hardening  of  his  political  arteries. 
His  early  Liberal  velleities  have  dried  up,  the 
generous  impulses  of  youth  throb  more  slowly, 
and  apart  from  some  intellectual  gristle  his 
only  connections  with  Liberalism  are  personal. 
He  is  out  of  sympathy  with  the  Prime  Minister's 
Russian  policy,  and  he  has  a  vigorous  contempt 
for  the  Parliamentary  Labour  Party,  which  he 
takes  no  trouble  to  conceal. 

In  certain  directions  he  has  seemed  to  suffer 
from  the  fixed  idea.  If  the  Conservatives  were 
wiser  they  would  have  made  an  attempt  to 
recapture  him,  but  there  again  personal  feelings 
stand  in  the  way,  for  neither  Bourbons  nor 
Orleanists  can  get  on  with  the  Bonapartists. 
At  present  he  is  indispensable  to  a  Coalition 
which  is  suffering  from  the  starvation  of  able 


150  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

men,  but  if  it  develops  towards  the  left,  as 
seems  most  likely,  one  sees  Churchill,  in  spite 
of  personal  prejudices,  becoming  a  leader  of  a 
new  Tory  party  with  ideas.  For  by  that  time 
the  fiscal  issue  will  have  become  obsolescent, 
and  there  will  be  room  in  the  party  for  a  new 
Canning  who,  satirising  needy  knife-grinders 
and  axe-grinders,  will  shape  foreign  policy  with 
dignity  and  wisdom. 


MR.  CHAMBERLAIN 


\N.I. 


Mr.  Austen  Chamberlain. 


X 

MR.    CHAMBERLAIN 

IT  is  better  to  be  the  father   of  a  famous 
son  than  the  son  of  a  famous  father,  for 
the    one     pHght     illumines    merit     that 
would  else  have  remained  obscure,  while  the 
other  by  comparison  makes  honest  talent  seem 
mere  mediocrity. 

Mr.  Austen  Chamberlain  has  suffered  in  that 
way.  But  if  he  owed  his  opportunities  to  his 
father,  his  reputation  after  twenty-three  years 
of  political  life  is  now  his  own  and,  such  as  it 
is,  has  been  earned  on  his  own  merits  and 
demerits.  Entirely  his  own  making,  too,  is  his 
personal  popularity  and  a  curious  formal 
courtesy  in  debate  which  is  unique.  It  is  odd 
that  the  son  of  a  man  who  had  so  rough  a 
tongue  should  be  almost  the  only  formalist 
now  left  in  debate ;  odd,  too,  that  the  son 
should  revert,  against  the  tendency  of  the  age, 
to  the  rhetorical  periods  which  his  father  dis- 
carded, when  they  were  in  fashion,  for  his  own 
incomparable  style.  But  the  younger  men 
sometimes  will  go  a  generation  back  instead  of 
a  generation  forward.     He  is  one  of  the  few 

153 


154  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

men  who  will  wear  his  silk  hat  in  listening  to 
debate.  To  see  him  with  his  hat  tilted  over 
his  eyes  and  his  arms  folded,  apparently 
slumbering,  is  to  sit  on  Mr.  Wells's  time- 
machine  and  be  carried  back  to  mid- Victorian 
politics.  Perhaps  that  is  it.  He  may  be,  in 
fact  he  is,  mid- Victorian. 

He  was  bred  to  politics.  Rugby,  Cambridge 
under  Seeley,  the  Ecole  des  Sciences  Politiques 
of  Paris,  and  something  at  Berlin  each  contri- 
buted in  turn  to  his  character  or  accomplish- 
ment ;  his  father,  evidently,  planned  his 
education  so  that  he  should  be  like  himself 
with  the  corners  knocked  off  and  the  hollows 
filled  in.  He  began  his  political  life  as  his 
father's  private  secretary ;  Gladstone's  com- 
pliment to  his  maiden  speech  on  Home  Rule  in 
1892,  that  it  was  a  speech  to  gladden  a  father's 
heart,  was  not  only  deserved  by  the  speaker 
but,  incidentally,  was  one  of  the  few  nice 
things  that  Gladstone  ever  said  about  a  Cham- 
berlain. Then  he  ran  through  the  usual  cursus 
honorum  of  minor  offices,  doing  everything 
quite  well,  if  without  distinction,  and  all  the 
time  increasing  his  claim  to  consideration  for 
himself  and  not  for  his  father's  sake.  He  was 
in  every  respect  superior  to  the  average  son  of 
a  great  name.  He  had  ability,  character, 
plenty  of  information,  and,  unlike  the  ordinary 


MR.    CHAMBERLAIN  155 

young  aristocrat,  realised  the  importance  of 
being  earnest.  A  little  more  and  he  might 
have  captured  the  imagination  of  his  party  and 
become  its  leader,  for  with  Mr.  Balfour  out  of 
the  way,  his  rivals  were  not  dangerous.  What 
was  it  that  was  lacking  ? 

He  had  no  power  of  original  thought,  but 
that  was  not  very  serious,  for,  like  other 
politicians,  he  might  have  borrowed  the  ideas 
of  others.  But  the  one  thing  necessary  to 
achieve  real  distinction  is  to  bring  something 
new  into  them  from  without — a  gospel  of 
sorts,  a  new  idiom  of  thought  or  expression, 
some  new  leaven  or  it  may  be  an  explosive. 
Mr.  Chamberlain's  whole  bringing  up  had  been 
such  as  to  make  that  impossible  in  his  case. 
He  began  life  with  a  ready-made  political 
programme — as  though  any  programme  were  of 
any  use  unless  you  have  helped  to  make  it 
yourself  1  He  saw  his  politics  so  much  as  a 
family  affair  that  he  might  just  as  well  have 
belonged  to  one  of  the  Whig  ruling  houses. 
If  his  father  had  been  a  Whig,  all  his  great 
ability  could  never  have  carried  him  so  far ; 
but  the  son's  whole  training  might  have  been 
designed  to  reconstitute  the  Whiggery  which  his 
father's  career  had  done  so  much  to  overthrow. 

The  Unionist  Party  in  the  stormy  days  that 
followed  the  election  of  1906,  having  cast  out 


156  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

the  Cecil  dynasty,  was  not  in  the  mood  to  set 
up  a  Chamberlain  dynasty,  and  perhaps  it 
recognised  instinctively  that,  in  spite  of  the 
vigour  and  orthodoxy  of  his  Unionist  faith,  his 
whole  habit  of  mind  was  still  that  of  its  heredi- 
tary enemies,  the  Whigs.  What  is  a  rising 
politician  to  do  who  has  all  his  life  seen  politics 
from  the  inside  and  belongs  to  a  ruling  family 
which  has  lost  its  political  prerogatives  ? 
There  are  only  two  alternatives.  Either  he 
goes  to  the  House  of  Lords,  or  he  throws  in  his 
lot  with  that  other  power  behind  the  throne  of 
democracy,  the  Civil  Service.  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain took  the  second  alternative.  He  is  not, 
of  course,  a  member  of  the  Civil  Service,  but 
he  is  the  embodied  representative  in  politics  of 
its  spirit.  Perhaps  that  has  been  the  trouble 
with  him  from  first  to  last,  that  he  is  not  really 
a  politician  at  all,  but  a  Civil  servant  who 
happens  to  hold  a  position  in  the  Government. 
It  is  not  a  crime  to  be  a  Civil  servant,  but 
the  qualities  of  mind  that  make  a  man  a  good 
bureaucrat  disqualify  him  for  creative  politics. 
In  ordinary  times,  when  what  is  best  adminis- 
tered may  be  best.  Ministers  may  be  wise  who 
are  content  to  express  the  ideas  of  their  per- 
manent officials  in  appropriate  Parliamentary 
language,  though  that  was  not  Mr.  Joseph 
Chamberlain's  way  at  the  Colonial  Office.    Mr. 


MR.    CHAMBERLAIN  157 

Austen  Chamberlain's  mature  years  were  cast 
in  extraordinary  times.  He  was  Secretary  for 
India  in  the  early  part  of  the  Great  War.  A 
statesman  would  have  cast  about  for  some 
simple  general  idea  of  the  sort  of  assistance 
that  India  could  most  usefully  render,  and 
would  have  devised  plans  to  suit  his  conclusion 
and  resolutely  fought  all  deviations  from  it. 
Obviously  the  work  for  India  in  the  war  was  to 
defeat  Turkey,  and  when  the  Mesopotamian 
delta  had  been  secured  by  the  occupation  of 
Kurneh,  the  natural  strategy  for  India  was  not 
to  pursue  a  campaign  in  the  interior  of  a 
country  which  India  did  not  want,  but  to  cut 
the  communications  with  Constantinople  either 
by  forcing  the  Dardanelles  or  at  Alexandretta. 
These  objects  could  have  been  attained  by  the 
same  or  less  effort  as  was  expended  on  the 
expeditions  to  Baghdad  and  beyond. 

It  may  be  objected  that  it  was  not  Mr. 
Chamberlain's  business  to  foresee  and  work 
for  these  ends,  but  that  of  the  Commander-in- 
Chief  in  India,  and  that  is  no  doubt  true.  But 
a  statesman  would  have  foreseen  where  the 
Civil  servant  did  not.  The  function  of  the 
statesman  is  to  define  the  end,  and  of  the  Civil 
servant  to  devise  the  means.  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain's mind  remained  that  of  the  Civil  servant, 
obsequious  to  the  course  of  events  but  fore- 


158  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

stalling,  originating  nothing.  One  hastens  to 
add  that  it  had  all  the  Civil  servant's  sense  of 
honour,  for  he  took  on  himself  the  blame  for 
the  scandals  that  followed  in  Mesopotamia. 

The  same  bureaucratic  habit  of  mind  was 
even  more  clearly  revealed  in  his  tenure  of 
the  Chancellorship  of  the  Exchequer.  The 
statesman- Chancellor  would  have  early  seen 
that  the  country  neither  would  nor  could  stand 
a  scale  of  taxation  in  peace  to  which  it  had 
cheerfully  submitted  in  war.  He  would  have 
insisted  on  that  view  and  have  refused  to  take 
office  unless  it  was  accepted.  Having  got  it 
accepted,  he  would  have  revived  all  the  old 
rigours  of  Treasury  control  over  expenditure, 
and  there  would  have  been  no  thunderstorm 
at  Dover  or  anywhere  else.  But  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain is  a  Civil  Service  Chancellor.  Not  for  him 
to  shape  the  ends  of  policy,  to  foresee  the 
gathering  storm,  to  resist  tendencies  of  policy 
that  as  Chancellor  he  deplores.  What  he  does 
is  to  interpret  the  wishes  of  others  into  the 
language  of  finance ;  like  a  good  Civil  servant 
he  stands  by  his  class  and  defends  them 
through  thick  and  thin ;  the  Government  of 
the  country  is  the  fixed  star,  and  all  other 
interests  revolve  round  it  observing  order  due 
in  obedience  to  its  gravitation. 

The  means   he  took  to  the   ends   that   he 


MR.    CHAMBERLAIN  159 

has  consented  to  let  others  lay  down  for  him 
may  not  be  his  own  fault,  but  that  of  his 
official  advisers.  Certainly  his  lowering  of  the 
Excess  Profits  Duty  one  year  in  expectation  of 
a  collapse  that  did  not  come,  and  his  raising  it 
in  the  next  year  when  the  collapse  did  come 
was  a  double  miscalculation  that  destroys  any 
chance  of  a  reputation  for  financial  prescience. 
But  the  gravamen  of  the  charge  against  Mr. 
Chamberlain  is  not  the  mistakes  that  he  has 
made,  but  that  he  is  a  Civil  servant  with  the 
interests,  the  sympathies,  and  the  philosophy 
of  the  service,  which  thinks  always  that  if 
departmental  wheels  hum  sweetly  all  is  well 
with  the  country.  The  ideal  Chancellor  of  the 
Exchequer  would  be  a  master  of  the  Govern- 
ment and  a  servant  of  the  people.  Mr.  Cham- 
berlain has  been  the  people's  master  and  the 
Government's  servant.  Perhaps  it  was  in  any 
case  beyond  the  power  of  anyone  to  discipline 
national  finance,  but  Mr.  Chamberlain  might 
have  tried  harder  if  the  bent  of  his  mind  had 
been  other  than  it  was,  and  the  placing  of 
Treasury  control  in  the  hands  of  a  Cabinet 
Committee  would  then  have  been  a  victory  of 
his  policy  instead  of  a  criticism.  Nor  would 
there  have  been  any  talk  of  the  Indian  Vice- 
royalty  for  him. 

When  Bonar  Law  retired  through  ill-health, 


160  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

it  was  inevitable  that  Mr.  Chamberlain  should 
take  his  place  as  leader  of  the  Conservatives, 
and  he  was  elected  unanimously.  But  the 
thoughtful  saw  in  the  change  the  beginning  of 
the  end  of  the  present  Coalition.  Mr.  Bonar 
Law  was  an  accommodator  and  man  of  tact, 
skilled  to  smooth  over  differences ;  Mr.  Chamber- 
lain having  once  swallowed  a  poker,  differences 
under  his  regime  tend  to  confirm  themselves, 
for  his  view  of  politics  regards  them  as  the 
mechanical  resultant  in  a  parallelogram  of 
forces.  Mr.  Bonar  Law  was  skilled  at  adapting 
himself  to  the  changing  moods  of  the  House ; 
Mr.  Chamberlain,  though  his  formal  set 
speeches  have  dignity  and  sometimes  a  good 
deal  of  power,  is  stiff  and  unadaptable;  he 
has  political  learning,  but  little  mother- wit, 
and  on  an  issue  suddenly  presented  to  him, 
he  may  be  depended  upon  to  combine  the 
maximum  of  opposition  and  to  secure  the 
minimum  of  support.  He  has  been  for  these 
and  other  reasons  not  a  good  leader  of  the 
House  of  Commons.  Moreover,  there  is  little 
or  no  personal  sympathy  between  him  and  Mr. 
Lloyd  George,  and  though  on  some  questions — 
Ireland  may  be  one — his  views  are  more  liberal 
than  those  of  his  predecessor,  these  intellectual 
agreements  are  no  substitute  for  the  free 
conflict   of  ideas   which,  between   men  whose 


MR.    CHAMBERLAIN  161 

temperaments  match,  so  often  lead  to  good 
team  work.  With  some  men  you  differ  to 
agree,  or  else  must  quarrel  violently  ;  but  with 
men  of  Mr.  Chamberlain's  stamp  you  agree  to 
differ,  always  retaining  the  highest  personal 
esteem  for  them. 

A  reasonable  man,  simple  and  unaffected  in 
personal  intercourse,  a  capable  administrator, 
an  exceedingly  effective  speaker,  especially 
when  he  is  roused — Mr.  Chamberlain  has  all 
the  qualities  but  one  to  command  respect  and 
success.  But  he  cannot  fight  a  brother  official ; 
that  power  lacking,  there  are  many  offices  that 
would  suit  him,  but  the  Treasury,  alas,  was  an 
obvious  misfit.  And  it  was  another  misfit 
which  disqualifies  him  for  the  position  of 
leader  that  at  a  time  when  the  country  was  in 
full  revolt  against  being  over-governed  and 
against  officialdom  good  and  evil  alike,  he  should 
be  the  best  representative  amongst  politicians 
of  the  Civil  Service  mind. 


11 


SIR  GORDON  HEWART 


Sir  Gordon  Hewart. 


XI 

SIR    GORDON   HEWART 

THE  Attorney-General  has  not  escaped 
the  suspicion  that  always  attaches  to 
lawyers  who  are  politicians,  but  it 
would  be  juster  to  regard  him  as  a  politician 
who  is  a  lawyer.  The  first  sort  practise  the 
law  for  their  conscience,  and  take  to  politics 
as  the  only  sort  of  lay  preaching  whose  rewards 
are  not  laid  up  in  heaven.  The  second  and 
less  numerous  sort,  to  which  Sir  Gordon 
He  wart  belongs,  practise  the  law  for  its 
rewards,  and  politics  for  the  recreation  and,  if 
possible,  the  approval  of  their  conscience. 

He  was  a  politician  before  he  was  a  lawyer, 
and  he  must  have  written  as  many  newspaper 
articles  before  he  took  office  as  Mr.  Churchill 
since.  He  took  to  the  law  when  he  was  no 
longer  quite  young,  for  the  sake  of  liberty  and 
fees,  but  though  he  got  the  fees,  it  is  doubtful 
whether  he  captured  much  liberty.  The  life 
of  a  barrister  is  not,  it  has  been  said,  a  bed  of 
roses,  for  either  it  is  all  bed  and  no  roses,  or 
if  he  succeeds,  it  is  all  roses  and  no  bed.     And 

165 


166  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

becoming  a  law  officer  of  the  Crown  does  not 
mend  matters  in  that  respect,  for  these  much- 
abused  and  strangely  envied  men  do  twice  the 
work  for  half  the  fees,  and  in  addition  have 
politics  thrown  in  as  an  extra  shift.  No  man 
can  court  politics  and  law  quite  impartially. 
The  bias  to  the  one  or  the  other  must  come 
sooner  or  later,  and  in  Sir  Gordon  Hewart's 
case  it  seems  to  have  come  definitely  towards 
the  law. 

It  is  a  pity  from  some  points  of  view,  for 
he  has  political  gifts  that  have  not  found  full 
expression  in  the  Coalition.  In  his  younger 
days  he  used  to  plead  for  the  cause  of  constitu- 
tional reform  in  India,  and  liked  his  fling  at 
the  Liberal  Imperialists  ;  and  in  Manchester 
they  still  talk  of  the  masterly  speeches  in 
which  he  presented  the  Free  Trade  case  at  a 
by-election  there. 

One  often  hears  his  old  political  friends 
deplore  that  no  occasion  has  arisen  in  which  a 
scrupulously  loyal  member  of  the  Government 
(as  he  is)  could  have  made  an  appeal  on  behalf 
of  wronged  suffering  or  indulged  the  sympathy 
with  the  underdog  which  is  instinctive  with  a 
Liberal.  To  these  ardent  souls  his  Attorney- 
Generalship,  of  which  an  ex-Attorney-General 
of  great  distinction  said  recently,  that  never 
had  the  Crown  been  so  well  served  in  this 


SIR    GORDON    HEWART  167 

office  before,  seems  no  better  than  a  series  of 
appearances  in  behalf  of  Dora's  drunks  and 
disorderlies,  and  he  has  certainly  been  unfortu- 
nate in  some  of  the  legislation  put  under  his  care. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  is  only  fair  to  the 
Government  to  add  that  Sir  Gordon  He  wart 
might  have  been  Home  Secretary  if  he  had 
wished,  and  perhaps  at  one  time  Irish  Secretary 
too.  He  was  right  to  decline  both,  for  he  is 
rather  too  literal  for  Ireland,  and  too  sceptical 
for  the  Home  Office.  The  War  Office  might 
have  suited  him,  for  he  has  an  excellent  head 
for  business— he  is  one  of  the  few  men  in  the 
Coalition  Government  whose  administration  of 
his  office  is  above  criticism — and  the  India 
Office  certainly  would,  for  no  one  has  a 
keener  sympathy  with  the  cause  of  constitu- 
tional reform  or  more  dislike  for  the  arrogance 
of  a  race  ascendancy.  But  these  offices  would 
have  taken  him  away  from  the  law,  and  by 
the  time  they  presented  themselves  the  law 
had  him  firmly  by  the  leg. 

His  faithfulness  to  the  law  was  not  altogether 
to  the  taste  of  the  Government,  which  per- 
suaded him,  when  Lord  Reading  went  to  India, 
to  forgo  his  claims  to  the  Lord  Chief  Justice- 
ship, which  everyone  expected  to  be  given 
him,  and  to  remain  with  them.  The  undoubted 
regret  of  the  English  Bar  when  politics  kept 


168  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

him  is,  it  is  thought,  to  be  solaced  by  his 
appointment  later.  He  will  be  an  ideal  Lord 
Chief,  both  for  his  mastery  of  the  law,  and  for 
the  power  of  expressing  it  with  the  exactness 
of  a  scholar  and  the  dignity  of  a  born  orator. 
Sir  Gordon  Hewart  has  carried  orderliness  of 
mind  and  the  gift  of  style  to  the  point  of  genius. 
He  has  not  the  sonority  of  Mr.  Asquith,  but  he 
has  greater  subtlety,  as  sure  a  grasp  of  masses 
of  detail,  equal  tightness,  and  more  plasticity 
in  argument.  His  speech  is  smooth  and  pure ; 
the  words  fall  unerringly  into  their  place,  not 
with  the  somewhat  shambling  fluency  of  Lord 
Haldane,  but  eyes  right  and  shoulders  back 
like  toy  soldiers.  Even  his  impromptu 
speeches  still  manage  to  convey  the  same 
impression  of  perfect  prose,  and,  when  he  is 
arguing,  you  are  lost  unless  you  dispute  the 
premises,  for  there  is  never  a  nick  in  the 
smooth  surface  of  the  development. 

These  qualities  are  exceedingly  useful  in 
politics,  and  the  Government  likes  to  bring 
him  in  like  a  famous  consultant,  good  bedside 
manner  and  all,  to  their  desperate  cases. 
There  are  two  types  of  politicians.  One  type 
has  visions,  trances,  divination,  anacolutha, 
leaps,  and  to  this  type  belong  one  or  two  great 
men  in  a  generation  (Mr.  Lloyd  George  him- 
self, for    example),  and    hundreds  of   misfits. 


SIR    GORDON   HEWART  169 

The  other  type  are  exact  and  practical,  dishke 
*'  viewiness "  unless  it  is  well  warmed  by 
experience,  and  will  have  their  political  bread 
well  baked  and  with  a  good  crust.  Sir  Gordon 
Hewart  is  of  these  last.  It  is  readily  under- 
stood how  invaluable  such  a  man  must  be  to 
a  Government  like  the  Coalition.  He  speaks 
seldom  in  the  House,  but  his  success  has 
latterly  been  so  notable,  that  some  have 
even  begun  to  think  of  him  as  a  leader  of  a 
party.  Others  see  no  more  in  it  than  an 
example  of  the  perfect  lawyer  with  a  gift  of 
style  applying  himself  to  the  subject-matter 
of  politics. 

But  let  it  never  be  forgotten,  when  we 
contrast  the  lawyer  and  the  politician,  that 
the  edifice  of  British  liberties  is  raised  on  the 
foundations  of  the  common  law,  and  that  the 
great  classic  charters  of  English  political 
liberty  have  no  more  passion  and  imagination 
in  them  than  a  statement  of  claim.  A  man  is 
not  necessarily  lost  to  politics  when  he  becomes 
Lord  Chief  Justice,  and  there  is  an  immense 
mass  of  work  crying  out  to  be  done  on  the 
boundaries  of  law  and  politics.  Someone 
suggested  recently  that  Sir  Gordon  Hewart 
would  be  the  man  to  carry  out  the  work  of 
codification  if  this  is  ever  seriously  to  be 
undertaken  in  this  country. 


170  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

Sir  Gordon  Hewart,  by  reason  of  the  sim- 
plicity and  straightforwardness  of  his  political 
views,  is  a  good  example  of  the  Coalition 
Liberal,  and  as  such  has  been  frequently  made 
a  target  of  abuse  by  those  to  whom  a  Liberal 
faith  is  not  a  compass  to  guide  a  man  through 
his  political  difficulties,  but  a  line  to  be  toed. 
To  him  the  war  came  as  an  even  ruder  shock 
than  to  many  others  because,  instead  of  con- 
firming his  diagnosis  of  politics,  it  seemed 
to  make  havoc  of  much  that  he  had 
implicitly  believed.  To  these  men  Coalition 
presented  itself  first  as  a  condition  necessary 
for  winning  the  war  (as  it  certainly  was),  and 
secondly  as  a  necessary  stage  in  the  develop- 
ment of  the  Liberal  faith  itself.  They  believed 
that  the  moment  the  faith  hardened  into 
dogma  it  must  die  here,  as  it  has  all  but  died 
abroad,  and  they  thought  that  in  a  few  years 
a  new  Liberalism  would  emerge,  including  the 
best  elements  of  both  parties  and  even  possibly 
a  wing  of  the  Labour  men.  It  was  because  he 
stood  for  this  belief  that  Sir  Gordon  Hewart 
went  down  to  the  Liberal  meetings  at  Leaming- 
ton last  year  and  was  in  effect  drummed  out 
of  the  party. 

Whether  his  tactics  were  right  or  wrong, 
time  only  can  show,  but  his  policy  of  wanting 
a  restatement  of  the  Liberal  faith  has  already 


SIR    GORDON    HEWART  171 

been  proved  to  be  right.  In  fact,  a  great 
Liberal  reaction  has  begun  in  this  country,  and 
the  difficulty  is  that  its  pace  has  outstripped 
the  power  of  any  political  machinery  to  adapt 
itself  to  the  changes.  But  it  is  not  a  reaction 
to  the  Liberal  faith  in  its  old  forms.  Under 
what  banner  it  will  ultimately  range  itself  no 
one  can  say  for  certain.  If  under  the  banner 
of  the  Independent  Liberals,  it  will  be  because 
they  too  have  moved.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
may  be  under  some  new  Coalition  banner, 
with  Mr.  Lloyd  George  or  someone  else  leading. 
The  recent  movement  in  English  politics 
towards  a  union  of  Coalition  and  Independent 
Liberals  has,  very  rightly,  attracted  much 
attention,  and  if  it  matures  will  justify  the 
position  that  Liberals  like  Sir  Gordon  Hewart 
have  taken  in  the  politics  of  the  last  five  years. 
Personalities  apart,  there  is  precious  little 
between  the  Coalition  Liberals  and  their  old 
friends,  who  have  paid  them  the  compliment 
of  imitating  their  policy  and  reshaping  the  old 
faith  to  new  conditions.  What  a  meeting 
there  maybe  some  day  of  these  flying  tangents  I 


LADY  ASTOR 


Lady  Astor. 


A 


XII 

LADY   ASTOR 

the  first  woman  Member  of  the 
British  House  of  Commons,  Lady 
Astor  has  already  won  a  place  in 
history.  Her  place  in  the  House  itself  is 
less  certain.  On  her  first  day,  when  she  was 
introduced  by  the  Prime  Minister  and  Mr. 
Balfour,  it  looked  (they  say)  for  a  fraction 
of  a  second  as  though  she  would  like  to  take 
a  seat  on  the  front  Government  Bench,  between 
these  two  good  friends. ^     Having  avoided  this 

1  This  ceremony  of  introduction  is  an  awkward  and  even 
a  formidable  ceremony.  You  stand  with  a  sponsor  on  each 
side  of  you,  at  the  bar  of  the  House,  which  is  a  brass  plate 
about  12  feet  in  front  of  the  door,  marking  the  place  where 
the  formalities  of  the  "  floor "  begin.  The  newly-elected 
Member  waits  there  until  the  Speaker  calls  him,  and  then 
bows,  if  possible  in  time  with  his  two  sponsors.  The  three 
then  march  half-way  up  the  floor,  if  possible  in  alignment, 
then  halt,  bow  again,  and  then  march  up  to  the  Mace,  where 
they  bow  for  the  third  time,  and  the  sponsors  then  leave 
the  new  Member  in  charge  of  the  Clerk,  who  administers  the 
oath,  and  makes  him  sign  his  name  in  a  book.  The  House 
always  appreciates  any  little  comicalities  to  which  these 
manoeuvres  may  give  rise.  The  instinct  of  a  man  introduced 
to  an  assembly  of  women  in  these  circumstances  would 
undoubtedly  be  to  sit  down  confusedly  next  to  his  two  ascer- 
tained friends. 

175 


176  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

perilous  place,  she  took  the  seat  of  Sir  William 
Joynson-Hicks,  that  gentleman  being  away  in 
Egypt,  but  on  his  return  some  time  later,  he 
made  a  constitutional  affair  of  it,  and  Lady 
Astor  had  to  take  refuge  on  the  Labour 
Benches,  where  she  sits  somewhat  vagrantly, 
but  usually  under  the  lee  of  the  portly  Mr. 
Will  Thorne.  The  Labour  men  sit  less  on 
their  dignity,  and  she  has  good  friends  amongst 
them,  including  Mr.  J.  H.  Thomas  ;  and  when 
they  differ  it  is  with  the  utmost  amiability.  In 
spite  of  her  millions,  it  is  noticeable  that  the 
average  working-man  gets  her  woman's  point  of 
view  much  more  quickly  than  the  average  middle - 
class  man.  In  Virginia  Lady  Astor  belonged 
to  what  would  here  be  called  the  squirearchy. 
But  she  was  one  of  a  big  family,  and  they  work 
hard  on  the  land  in  America.  The  squirearchy 
of  the  Langhornes  was  more  like  what  you  will 
find  in  Galway  or  Tipperary  than  in  Sussex 
or  South  Cheshire,  only  it  was  free  from  the 
snobbery  that  is  the  besetting  sin  of  Irish  life. 
She  learned  much  in  those  early  days  which  she 
has  never  forgotten ;  and  her  sympathy  with 
labour  is  quite  free  from  affectation  and  in 
certain  directions  very  deep. 

Her  Parliamentary  manners  lack  the  intel- 
lectual sexlessness  of,  say,  women  deputies  in 
Finland,    nor    do    they    imitate   the    studied 


LADY    ASTOR  177 


somnolence  of  the  British  male  legislator, 
who,  when  he  wants  to  look  the  part, 
crosses  his  legs,  closes  his  eyes,  and  tilts  his 
hat  (if  he  is  wearing  one)  on  to  his  nose.  She 
is  restless  and  animated  as  she  listens,  and 
approval  or  disapproval  is  shown  in  her  face, 
and  sometimes  signified  sotto  voce  to  her 
neighbours.  She  has  adopted  a  kind  of  Par- 
liamentary uniform,  consisting  of  a  dark  blue 
skirt,  a  white  blouse,  and  white  gloves,  which 
she  often  wears  about  her  wrists,  leaving  her 
hands  bare  the  better  to  handle  papers.  She 
has  acquired  the  Parliamentary  habit  of  leaving 
the  House  when  bores  are  up,  but  not  the 
trick  of  asking  questions  which  with  her  leave 
the  interrogative  and  acquire  the  hortatory  or 
reproachful  mood,  and  get  her  ruled  out  of 
order.  She  speaks  rarely,  and  not  attractively. 
Her  voice  is,  in  its  upper  notes,  a  little  harsh  (a 
common  fault  amongst  fashionable  women  in 
England),  has  one  or  two  good  deep  notes, 
but  no  intermediate  tones.  There  are  faint 
traces  of  an  American  accent,  and  dropped  final 
g's,  like  flies  in  amber,  show  that  she  must  have 
entered  English  society  about  twenty  years  ago, 
when  the  smart  set  boycotted  this  letter.  She 
pleads  and  coaxes  (like  a  missionary  to  an 
assembly  of  inebriates),  but  does  not  argue. 
She  has  learned  not  to  address  her  remarks  to 
12 


178  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

one  Member,  but  to  the  Speaker,  who,  however, 
is  often  visibly  embarrassed  by  buttonhoHng 
exhortations  to  combat  the  evils  of  strong  drink. 
On  the  other  hand,  there  is  sometimes  an 
original  or  graphic  turn  of  phrase,  and  she  is 
good  at  a  retort.  Her  subjects  are  the  drink 
question,  and  everything  that  concerns  the 
family  life  ;  Plymouth,  where  her  constituents 
are  all  Drakes  and  Pilgrim  Fathers  ;  and  friendly 
relations  with  the  United  States  of  America,  on 
behalf  of  which  she  never  misses  an  opportu- 
nity of  putting  in  a  word.  But  as  a  speaker  she 
frankly  disappoints  the  House.  She  is  clearly 
not  an  intellectual  woman,  and  her  influence 
in  politics,  which  is  rather  greater  than  is 
generally  thought,  is  due  to  purely  feminine 
qualities.  Conspicuous  among  these  qualities 
are  mother  wit  and  a  ready  tongue,  simplicity, 
naturalness,  and  the  other  qualities  that  make 
a  good  electioneer.  Electioneering,  indeed,  is 
her  strength  outside  the  House,  and  her  weak- 
ness within  it,  for  the  House,  like  Royalty,  does 
not  like  being  spoken  to  like  a  public  meeting. 
She  has,  too,  the  simple  direct  logic  that 
gets  things  done.  It  is  one  of  the  vanities 
of  men  to  deny  the  possession  of  logic 
to  women,  but  Shakespeare,  who  understood 
women,  knew  better.  Macbeth  and  Lady 
Macbeth   represent   the   typical   antithesis   of 


LADY    ASTOR  179 


man  and  woman  where  action  is  concerned. 
The  man  is  for  ever  balancing  alternatives, 
trying  to  make  the  best  of  both  worlds,  and 
making  ineffective  compromises  between 
irreconcilable  courses.  With  the  woman  the 
transition  from  an  opinion  to  a  policy  or  an 
act  is  much  more  direct ;  it  was  Lady  Macbeth 
who  said,  **Give  me  the  dagger."  Lady  Astor 
is  like  that  when  she  is  denouncing  the  liquor 
trade.  It  explains  too  (though  in  this  case 
there  is  no  question  of  daggers)  why  she  has 
always  had  so  great  a  dislike  for  Mr.  Asquith 
as  a  politician.  Women,  generally,  have  an 
instinctive  preference  for  extreme  and  logical 
policies.  If  Lady  Astor  has  seemed  once  or 
twice  of  late  to  shake  her  head  doubtfully  over 
her  old  political  hero,  the  Prime  Minister,  it  is 
probably  because,  in  his  anxiety  to  keep  the 
Coalition  together,  he  has  conceded  too  much 
to  compromise  and  ambiguity. 

The  influence  of  enfranchised  women  on 
political  affairs  is  one  of  the  chief  elements  of 
doubt  in  modern  English  politics.  They  are 
more  tangential  and  less  stable  than  the  male 
elector,  and  less  under  the  control  of  the 
party  machine.  The  old  fear  that  they  would 
vote  as  women  in  opposition  to  men  has 
turned  out  to  be  groundless,  as  sensible  people 
always  prophesied  that  it  would  do  ;    but  the 


180  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

masses  of  women  voters  are  easily  carried 
away  by  an  agitation,  and  when  their  sym- 
pathies are  once  aroused,  they  have  no  party 
ties  and  no  old  political  traditions  to  hold 
them  back.  They  pass  easily  from  one  side 
to  another,  and  there  is  reason  to  think  that 
the  remarkable  turnover  of  votes  in  recent  by- 
elections,  especially  in  the  Home  Counties,  was 
due  in  great  measure  to  the  women  electors. 
Varium  et  mutabile  semper.  They  are  certainly 
not  going  to  be  the  politically  Conservative 
force  in  the  electorate  that  was  once  thought, 
and  their  enfranchisement  has  undoubtedly 
increased  the  power  of  the  agitator  (within 
certain  well-defined  limits,  however,  for  most 
women  are  socially,  though  not  politically, 
Conservative).  If  these  views  be  sound,  the 
change  may  still  be  for  the  better,  for  it  is 
possible  even  for  the  ship  of  State  to  have 
too  much  ballast,  and  they  are  certainly  no 
argument  against  enfranchisement  which,  like 
earlier  enfranchisements  of  men,  was  given  as 
a  right  and  not  in  expectation  of  the  results, 
good  or  evil,  that  might  be  expected  to  follow. 
But  they  do  increase  the  interest  that  Lady 
Astor  has  as  the  first  woman  Member  of 
Parliament. 

The  real  danger  is  the  persistently  personal 
character  of  their  political  judgments.     Alike 


LADY    ASTOR  181 


in  its  remorseless  logic  and  in  its  personal 
barb,  the  white  feather  crusade  in  the  war  was 
typical  of  women's  psychology  in  politics.  But 
it  is  better  that  the  first  woman  Member 
should  be  a  typically  feminine  woman  without 
any  marked  political  abilities,  and  with 
interests  that  run  entirely  in  the  direction  of 
social  conservatism.  There  are  women  in 
politics  who,  whether  as  speakers  or  as  thinkers 
on  politics,  are  far  better  than  most  men  at 
their  own  game  ;  the  suffrage  movement  threw 
up  dozens  of  such  women.  Had  the  first 
woman  M.P.  been  of  this  type,  her  contribu- 
tion to  Parliamentary  politics  might  have  been 
more  momentous,  but  it  would  hardly  have 
been  so  distinctive  as  Lady  Astor's.  She  would 
have  added  no  new  idiom  to  our  Parliamentary 
politics  ;  she  would  merely  have  exaggerated 
the  bias  that  masculine  politics  have  acquired 
through  centuries  of  Parliamentary  govern- 
ment, might  have  terrified  the  average  man  by 
her  ability  and  perhaps  produced  a  reaction 
against  women  candidatures.  But,  though  Lady 
Astor's  Parliamentary  achievement  has  not  been 
great,  it  has  served  to  indicate  the  most  impor- 
tant service  that  women  may  render  in  Parlia- 
ment. The  most  useful  women  Members,  at 
any  rate  for  the  present,  are  not  those  who 
can  discuss  men's  politics  most  like  men,  but 


182  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

those  who  can  introduce  new  subjects  that 
men  have  overlooked,  and  new  points  of  view 
not  even  suspected.  Lady  Astor  has  made 
herself  the  representative  of  women's  interest 
in  home  life,  rather  than  in  public  life.  When 
she  talks  temperance  reform,  it  is  not  merely 
or  so  much  because  it  will  contribute  to  the 
communal  welfare,  but  because  she  regards 
intemperance  as  an  organised  commercial  fraud 
upon  the  home.  This  same  inspiration  runs 
through  many  of  her  speeches,  and  not  on 
temperance  alone  ;  for  in  her  zeal  for  education 
there  is  the  same  womanly  zeal  for  the  welfare 
of  the  young  and  the  increase  of  efficiency. 
She  may  talk  about  the  general  welfare,  but 
really  it  is  the  woman's  interest  in  the  welfare 
of  the  individual  that  animates  her.  She  has 
the  woman's  interest,  too,  in  health  and  nursing, 
as  she  showed  by  turning  her  beautiful  house 
at  Cliveden,  up  the  Thames,  into  a  hospital 
during  the  war,  and  she  has  the  greatest  con- 
tempt for  those  anti-wasters  who  attack  the 
work  of  the  health  and  the  education  depart- 
ments without  distinguishing  between  the  waste 
of  inefficient  administration  and  the  sound 
national  investment  of  more  knowledge  and 
better  health.  She  has  courage  and  her 
instincts  are  usually  sound.  But  one  serious 
mistake  that  she  made  in  opposing  desertion 


LADY    ASTOR  183 


as  a  ground  for  divorce,  gave  a  handle  to  much 
misrepresentation.  Her  first  marriage  was  an 
unhappy  one,  and  she  had  obtained  a  judicial 
separation  for  desertion  which  later  became  a 
decree  of  divorce.  She  was  reproached  with 
having  obtained  a  collusive  divorce  on  the 
ground  of  desertion,  and  for  denying  to 
working-women  the  freedom  of  divorce  that 
she  had  claimed  for  herself.  Her  answer  was 
complete,  though  somewhat  technical,  but  the 
attacks  undoubtedly  injured  her,  not  only  with 
the  vulgar,  but  even  with  some  who,  though 
not  vulgar,  did  not  know  her.  The  offend- 
ing speech  was  an  example  of  her  impulsive 
but  ill-considered  regard  for  the  unit  of  the 
family. 

Lady  Astor's  real  influence  in  politics  is 
exercised  outside  the  House  as  a  hostess. 
The  Astor  salon  in  London,  and  still  more  her 
house-parties  in  the  country,  are  the  occasion 
of  many  meetings  between  men  of  different 
parties,  and  undoubtedly  did  much  to  make 
Coalition  easier.  Lady  Astor  is  not  an 
intriguer,  nor  are  her  own  political  views 
either  deep  or  subtle.  But  she  has  a  keen  eye 
for  ability,  and  it  is  her  delight  to  know  able 
men  and  to  make  them  know  each  other.  Mr. 
Balfour  and  Mr.  Lloyd  George  were  of  her 
circle,  and  the  esteem  which  these  two  men, 


184  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

temperamentally  so  different,  undoubtedly 
have  for  each  other  may  have  originated  or 
been  confirmed  at  her  parties.  She  has  the 
woman's  gift  of  realism  when  she  is  meeting 
men  and  not  dealing  with  principles,  and  she  is 
an  ideal  hostess,  who  loves  to  be  kind  to 
merit  while  it  is  still  obscure. 


MR.  J.  H.  THOMAS 


Mr.    J.    H.    Ihomas. 


XIII 
MR .  J.    H.    THOMAS 

MR.  J.  H.  THOMAS,  at  a  small  con- 
ference, was  once  whirling  wild 
words  round  his  head  like  a  battle- 
axe,  when  the  Prime  Minister  interrupted  him. 
*'  That's  all  very  well  for  the  heathen,  Mr. 
Thomas,"  he  said,  "  but  remember  that  I'm  a 
Welshman  too." 

To  be  a  Welshman  usually  means  that  you 
have  the  gift  of  splitting  yourself  up  into 
several  personalities  and  speaking  out  of  each 
in  turn  as  though  it  were  your  whole  self. 
The  Anglo-Saxon,  who  has  not  this  gift,  is  apt 
to  call  it  by  hard  names,  and  thereby  often 
does  his  brother  Celt  an  injustice.  Mr.  Thomas 
has  suffered  from  time  to  time  in  this  way,  but 
in  reality  he  has  a  simple  nature,  and  his  ends 
are  quite  straightforward  and  sincere.  Only, 
it  must  be  remembered  that  whereas  the  mere 
Englishman  is  inflexional  in  his  mental  pro- 
cesses, the  Celt  is  agglutinative.  The  one 
reaches    his    conclusions,    like    a   weak   verb, 

187 


188  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

without  altering  his  radical  vowel,  the  other 
passes  through  half  a  dozen  stems  before 
arriving  at  his  final  meaning. 

Mr.  Thomas  has  probably  a  stronger  hold 
over  the  railwaymen  than  any  other  Labour 
leader  has  over  his  union.  He  began  work  as 
an  errand-boy  at  nine  years  of  age,  became  an 
engine-cleaner,  and  later  an  engine-driver,  and 
according  to  the  Great  Western  Railway  Com- 
pany a  very  good  one.  He  entered  national 
politics  by  way  of  the  municipal  affairs  of  Swin- 
don, and  by  his  remarkable  work  in  organising 
the  various  railway  trade  unions  into  a  single 
amalgamation.  He  is  a  great  believer  in 
organisation  by  industry  and  not  by  the  multi- 
farious trades  contained  within  the  industry, 
and  much  of  Mr.  Thomas's  reputation  in  his 
union  is  due  to  the  accumulation  of  thousands 
of  unrecorded  feats  of  tact  in  smoothing  over 
sectional  jealousies.  This  sort  of  thing  grows 
the  man  as  the  madrepores  grow  the  coral 
islands,  and  the  recurring  concept  of  Mr. 
Thomas  is  of  one  wiping  his  brows  after  some 
prodigy  of  tactful  persuasion  and  murmuring, 
**0h,  what  a  time  I  have  had  with  my  men !  " 
Many  stories  are  told  of  the  joint  operations 
of  the  distinguished  Mr.  Spenlow  Thomas  and 
plain  Mr.  Thomas  Jorkins,  but  they  are  very 
likely  untrue,  and  if  they  were  true  they  none 


MR.    J.    H.    THOMAS  189 

of  them  affect  the  essential  integrity  of  the 
firm.    All  some  men 

have  power  to  see  is  a  straight  staff  bent  in  a  pool, 

and  one  seems  to  remember  reading  in  Jefferies 
somewhere  that  if  you're  fishing  and  want  to 
catch  your  fish,  you  must  not  throw  a  straight 
shadow  over  the  water ;  a  crooked  shadow 
does  not  matter  so  much,  because  it  may  be 
mistaken  for  an  overhanging  bough.  Mr. 
Thomas  throws  a  crooked  shadow.  But  then 
what  a  pool !  And  what  big,  shy,  and  wily 
fish  !     The  man  himself  is  straight. 

Mr.  Thomas  is  not  a  bookish  man,  though  he 
can  write  forcibly,  and  almost  his  only  school 
has  been  in  public  affairs.  Such  men  labour 
under  disadvantages,  of  which  the  chief  is  that 
because  you  are  always  learning,  and  therefore 
changing  your  mind,  you  are  supposed  to  have 
no  mind  of  your  own,  or,  worse  still,  to  have 
two  minds,  which  you  use  alternatively  as 
convenience  dictates.  Liter  a  scripta  manet, 
and  so,  both  for  good  and  evil,  does  a  principle 
which  comes  out  of  a  book,  and  has  been 
diligently  conned  in  youth.  But  half  the  stern, 
immutable  principles  that  are  so  much  admired 
are  really  stiff -jointedness,  a  sort  of  rheumatism 
caught  in  early  education  which  those  men 
whose  schooling  has  been  in  mature  life  escape. 


190  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Mr.  Thomas  has  no  fixed  philosophy  of  poHtics 
in  the  academic  or  scholastic  sense ;  nor  is 
there  a  commoner  mistake  made  in  judging  the 
great  leaders  of  trade  union  action  in  England 
than  that  of  imagining  them  to  be  working 
out  everything  according  to  some  theory. 
They  may  do  that  in  Germany  or  Russia, 
but  not  here,  where  they  are  nearly  to  a  man 
opportunists  and  tacticians  whose  aims  depend 
not  only  or  even  so  much  on  their  precon- 
ceived views,  but  on  what  the  other  people  do. 
It  is  a  vice  of  class  consciousness  in  the 
bourgeoisie  that  it  regards  Labour  policy  as 
something  outside  its  own  influence,  whereas 
in  fact  they  have  as  much  to  do  with  shaping 
it  as  the  Labour  leaders  themselves.  If  they 
are  class-conscious,  so  will  the  proletariat  be  ; 
if,  on  the  other  hand,  they  understand  and 
respond,  they  will  meet  with  response,  and 
politics  will  be  a  subtle  chemistry  of  human 
nature,  as  they  should  be,  and  not  the  conflict 
of  fixed  mechanical  forces.  That  is  the  nearest 
approach  to  a  general  idea  for  which  men  like 
Mr.  Thomas  stand. 

A  man  who  has  made  a  national  anything  is 
in  danger  of  becoming  a  nationaliser,  and  Mr. 
Thomas,  if  not  a  theoretical  Socialist,  is  a 
Socialist  with  regard  to  railways.  But  he  is 
quite  definitely  Fabian  and  not  revolutionary, 


MR.    J.    H.    THOMAS  191 

and  he  dislikes  strikes.  His  idea  of  a  Labour 
leader  is  that  he  should  be  able  to  get  what 
he  wants  without  a  strike.  He  does  not 
inflame,  he  does  not  bluff,  and  though  his  own 
presentation  of  himself  as  one  who  is  always 
wrestling  with  beasts  at  Ephesus  is  overdrawn, 
he  will  oppose  the  majority  when  opposition 
has  a  fair  chance  of  success  ;  he  will  stand  up 
for  what  he  considers  the  best  policy  for  the 
country,  provided  that  the  cost  be  not  too 
great ;  and  he  will  leap  down  from  the  fence 
on  the  dry  side  if  the  alternative  is  falling  into 
the  last  ditch.  He  is  a  wise  rather  than  a 
heroic  counsellor,  but  it  is  the  better  part 
both  for  the  country  and  for  his  union,  as 
recent  events  have  shown. 

Mr.  Thomas  at  his  best  is  an  impressive 
speaker,  in  spite  of  his  Cockney  isms.  He 
always  sees  an  issue  in  a  big  sort  of  way,  and 
when  he  is  seen  quaking  and  trembling  at  the 
approaching  last  day,  it  is  not  from  affectation, 
but  from  the  natural  man's  terror  and  rever- 
ential awe  before  the  cosmic  processes.  His 
mind  is  exceedingly  quick  :  he  misses  no  point 
in  an  argument ;  he  negotiates  with  art,  and 
on  occasion  with  directness.  When  a  problem 
is  first  propounded,  he  sidles  and  minces  up  to 
it  like  a  stoat  hunting  a  rabbit ;  but  he  ends 
by   biting   once   and   no   more.     With   every 


192  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

temptation  to  become  as  one  of  the  bourgeoisie, 
he  is  loyal  to  his  class,  and  his  friendships  out- 
side of  it  do  not  affect  the  direction  of  his 
policy,  though  they  may  be  responsible  for 
some  of  its  twists.  His  ambition  is  to  go 
down  to  history  as  the  skilful  steersman  through 
dangerous  currents  into  still  waters.  The  men 
who  steer  do  not  row  at  the  same  time,  and 
there  is  always  the  danger  of  their  being  swept 
away.  If  Mr.  Thomas  is  swept  away,  it  will 
be  the  fault  of  the  middle  classes  as  much  as 
of  his  own,  and  it  will  be  against  his  wish  and 
inclination. 

He  hates  political  abstractions,  and,  while 
it  would  be  unfair  to  say  that  his  ideas  of 
progress  are  purely  material,  his  real  ambition 
for  the  proletariat,  if  analysed,  is  that  it 
should  cease  to  be  an  aggregation  of  hands  and 
should  acquire  some  of  the  bourgeoisie's  control 
of  its  labour  and  ownership  of  its  profits.  His 
Socialism  leans  to  the  guild  variety  rather 
than  to  that  of  the  omnipotent  State.  At 
heart  a  petit  bourgeois^  he  is  one  of  the  proofs 
that  a  man  may  be  that  and  still  not  cease  to 
be  a  loyal  member  of  the  proletariat. 


18 


LORD  BIRKENHEAD 


[Barratt 


Lord    Birkenhead. 


XIV 
LORD    BIRKENHEAD 

IT  is  a  solemn  thought  that  if  Lord  Birken- 
head had  remained  a  don  at  Oxford  he 
might  have  been  at  least  a  dean  of  his 
college  by  this  time,  with  a  pallor  and  a  slight 
stoop.  What  is  there  in  politics  and  the 
practice  of  the  common  law  that  keeps  men 
young,  so  that  the  occupant  of  the  Woolsack 
and  the  Keeper  of  the  King's  conscience  can 
carry  the  roses  of  youth  into  years  to  which 
business  and  learning  can  offer  only  the 
bouquet  of  tired  lilies  ?  For  Lord  Birkenhead 
is  not  alone  amongst  politician-lawyers  in 
thriving  on  irregular  hours,  scant  sleep,  hard 
work,  and  cooked  air.  There  are  dozens  like 
him,  only  less  so.  What  works  the  miracle  is 
the  athletics  of  the  game.  There  is  no  success 
in  politics  or  the  law  without  high  spirits,  and 
both  are  so  like  the  rough-and-tumble  of  foot- 
ball that  the  constant  intellectual  exercise  in 
them  has  the  same  effect  as  the  real  game, 
except  that  it  does  not  make  them  so  sleepy. 
So  true  is  it  that  the  mind  calls  the  tune  for 
the  body. 

196 


196  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Mr.  F.  E.  Smith  (as  he  was)  always  played 
politics  and  law  like  a  footballer.  In  his  early 
days  of  opposition  it  was  the  fashion  amongst 
Liberals  to  think  of  him  as  a  muddied  oaf 
in  the  serum,  and  to  contrast  his  superficial 
invective  with  the  solid  ratiocination  of  Sir 
John  Simon.  The  two  were  together  at 
Wadham  in  the  early  nineties — in  fact  they 
were  Wadham  with  some  assistance  from 
Mr.  C.  B.  Fry  and  Mr.  Francis  W.  Hirst. 
The  two  used  to  be  contrasted  like  the  cele- 
brated "  Popular  Educator  "  advertisement  of 
The  Boy  :  What  will  become  of  him  ?  and  Mr. 
Simon  was  always  on  the  top  line  ascending 
higher  and  higher  in  fame,  and  Mr.  Smith  on 
the  bottom  line  as  regularly  descending  in 
discredit.  The  comparison  did  an  injustice  to 
both,  but  especially  to  Mr.  Smith,  who  is 
essentially  a  serious  man — in  the  French  if  not 
in  the  English  sense  of  the  word.  He  had  to 
work  hard  at  Oxford,  for  his  father  died  young 
after  a  career  as  a  private  of  adventure  in  the 
army  and  a  successful  but  all  too  short  career 
at  the  Liverpool  Bar ;  and  when  Mr.  F.  E. 
Smith  himself  went  to  the  Bar  there  was  no 
slacking,  for  he  married  young.  A  great 
lawyer  he  certainly  is  not,  though  latterly  he 
has  seemed  to  be  in  some  danger  of  becoming 
one,  and  one  can  well  imagine  that  his  fondness 


LORD    BIRKENHEAD  197 

for  short  cuts  may  often  have  been  a  trial. 
But  he  was  not  a  Vinerian  scholar  for  nothing. 
No  Lord  Chancellor  ever  had  a  surer  grasp  of 
the  main  principles  of  law  than  he,  and,  what 
is  not,  perhaps,  so  well  known,  no  one  ever 
had  greater  power  of  work — hard,  rapid,  and 
at  the  same  time  sure.  In  law,  as  in  politics, 
he  has  falsified  the  predictions  of  the  old  fogies. 
Some  people  do  their  work,  as  the  Pharisees 
did  their  praying,  in  public  so  that  all  men 
may  see,  and  they  have  their  reward  in  being 
taken  very  seriously.  Mr.  Smith  in  this  matter 
of  work  was — still  is  as  Lord  Birkenhead  — 
one  of  the  Sadducees.  Work  with  him  is  a 
disagreeable  necessity,  the  mere  kitchen  and 
back  apartments  of  the  palace  that  is  life, 
not  to  be  explored,  still  less  exhibited.  But 
the  work  gets  done,  which  is  the  main  thing, 
and  when  it  is  done,  secretly  and  by  stealth, 
as  a  duke  might  keep  a  toffee-shop  to  add  to 
his  income,  the  real  business  of  a  free  man, 
which  is  to  enjoy  the  phantasmagoria  of  life 
and  power,  begins.  Lord  Birkenhead  has 
always  enjoyed  the  magnificences,  like  his  dis- 
tinguished predecessor  on  the  Woolsack,  Car- 
dinal Wolsey.  The  apocryphal  story  of  how 
Mr.  Justice  Bigham,  as  he  then  was,  pretended 
to  mistake  the  Mersey  Dock  and  Harbour 
Board's  new  buildings  for  Mr.  F.  E.  Smith's 


198  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

chambers  dates  back  to  his  days  as  a  junior  in 
Liverpool ;  and  after  that  beginning  £3,500 
for  a  Lord  Chancellor's  bathroom  is  not  much  to 
make  a  song  about.  Aristotle,  it  will  be  remem- 
bered, puts  magnificence  amongst  the  virtues. 

Lord  Birkenhead  comes  from  Lancashire,  but 
from  West  not  East  Lancashire,  and  it  makes  all 
the  difference.  East  Lancashire  goes  with  the 
West  Riding  of  Yorkshire,  West  Lancashire 
goes  with  Belfast ;  and  between  the  two  Lanca- 
shires  you  could  until  quite  recently  find  bits 
of  agricultural  country  as  feudal  as  Shropshire. 
In  spite  of  the  connection  of  trade,  the  separa- 
tion both  of  history  and  of  race  between  the 
two  is  complete,  and  it  explains  the  difference 
in  their  political  characters  and  between  the 
politics  of  Lord  Birkenhead  and  Sir  John 
Simon,  who  is  in  many  respects  a  typical 
Manchester  Liberal.  Scratch  an  East  Lanca- 
shire Liberal,  and  you  will  find  principles  as 
plentiful  and  unnutritious  as  unripe  black- 
berries, mixed  with  memories  of  Cobden  and 
of  the  hungry  forties,  and  of  the  wicked  early 
days  of  the  cotton  trade,  when  you  were  either 
a  tyrannical  exploiter  or  a  low-spirited  wage- 
slave.  Scratch  a  Liverpool  Conservative,  and 
you  will  probably  find  a  Belfast  democrat.  The 
key  to  Lord  Birkenhead's  politics  is  the  fact 
that  Liverpool  is  really  a  suburb  of  Ulster,  with 


LORD    BIRKENHEAD  199 

the  Irish  Sea  flowing  between  them  like  a  wide 
river.  The  same  may  be  said,  though  with  less 
truth,  of  Glasgow,  and  that  explains  why  Mr. 
Bonar  Law  allied  the  Conservative  Party  so 
closely  with  the  Ulster  malcontents  before  the 
war,  and  why  Lord  Birkenhead  was  Galloper 
Smith.  It  explains  the  Church  and  State 
paraphernalia  with  which  Liverpool  dowered 
Lord  Birkenhead  along  with  his  practice.  But 
it  explains  too  how  Lord  Birkenhead  is  so 
good  a  democrat — a  better  democrat,  surely, 
than  his  Liberal  anti-type.  Sir  John  Simon. 

Lord  Birkenhead  used  often  to  be  reproached 
for  the  abuse  and  low  argumentative  power  of 
his  speeches,  but  when  he  chooses  no  man  can 
argue  better.  His  first  speech  in  Parliament, 
delivered  in  the  first  days  of  Conservative 
depression  after  the  heavy  defeats  of  1906,  is 
often  said  to  have  been  the  most  successful 
maiden  speech  ever  made  in  the  Commons  ;  but 
in  fact  it  was  neither  better  nor  worse  than 
half  a  dozen  speeches  made  every  year  in  the 
Oxford  Union.  It  was  the  circumstance  of  the 
speech  that  made  it  so  effective  ;  and  nothing 
more  surely  proves  the  essential  balance  and 
sanity  of  Lord  Birkenhead's  mind  than  that  he 
recognised  that  fact  in  the  first  flush  of  success, 
and  when  next  he  spoke  was  very  careful  to  do 
something  entirely  different,  and  to  show  that 


200  POLITICAL  PROFILES 

he,  too,  could  argue  powerfully  on  a  serious 
and  dry  topic.  The  subject  was  the  exemption 
of  private  property  at  sea  from  capture  in  time 
of  war,  which  he  supported.  His  virulence,  his 
invective,  and  his  affectation  of  the  slapdash 
are  not  indiscretions,  but  calculated.  His  view, 
no  doubt,  is  that  people  do  not  want  argument 
at  a  public  meeting,  but  to  be  told  and 
amused,  and  though  he  must  often  have  under- 
rated the  intelligence  of  his  audiences,  it  is 
undoubtedly  true  that  a  public  meeting, 
especially  at  election  time,  is  about  the  worst 
medium  possible  for  a  serious  argument.  Lord 
Birkenhead  takes  dangerous  liberties  with 
forms,  and  he  must  be  the  one  Lord  Chancellor 
who  has  dared  to  be  off-hand  and  casual  on 
the  Woolsack.  Perhaps  that  manner  is  cal- 
culated too.  Oddly  enough,  when  he  writes 
he  is  serious  almost  to  stolidity,  unduly  em- 
barrassed, perhaps,  by  the  truth,  of  which  his 
practice  at  the  Bar  must  have  supplied  him 
with  many  awful  illustrations,  that  litera 
script  a  manet. 

The  office  of  Lord  Chancellor  used  to  be 
regarded  as  far  too  grave  and  reverend  for 
party  politics  in  the  ordinary  sense.  Sir  John 
Simon  declined  the  office  to  become  Home 
Secretary,  the  theory  being  that  when  a  man 
becomes  Lord  Chancellor  he  is  done  for  as  far 


LORD    BIRKENHEAD  201 

as  supreme  political  power  is  concerned.  There 
is  no  reason  why  that  should  be  so,  and  one 
would  be  much  surprised  if  Lord  Birkenhead 
intended  it  to  be  so.  On  the  contrary,  it  is 
said — ^with  what  truth  one  does  not  know — 
that  when  he  took  the  Lord  Chancellorship  it 
was  on  the  distinct  understanding  that  the 
House  of  Lords  should  be  reformed.  He  has 
certainly  never  acted  as  though  he  regarded 
his  office  as  in  any  degree  analogous  to  that  of 
the  Speaker  of  the  House  of  Commons.  His 
interventions  in  debate  are  frequent  and 
vigorous  ;  he  is  the  real  leader  of  the  House  ; 
and  in  a  reformed  House  his  power  in  politics 
would  be  immense,  almost  rivalling  that  of  a 
Prime  Minister  in  the  Commons.  His  speeches 
in  the  Lords  have  been  better  than  any  that  he 
made  in  the  Commons,  and,  paradoxically, 
have  had  more  genuine  passion.  A  speech  of 
his  on  the  reform  of  the  law  of  divorce,  in 
which  he  challenged  the  idea  of  marriage  as  a 
mere  ecclesiastical  sacrament,  glowed  with  con- 
viction, like  a  fire  challenging  red  against  the 
white  lawn  of  the  Bishops  ;  and  his  speech  on 
the  second  reading  of  the  Home  Rule  Bill, 
though  less  passionate,  was  worthy  of  its 
association  with  Lord  Grey's. 

Intellectually  honest  and  impatient  of  the 
pretentious    platitude   that   abounds   even   in 


202  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

the  Lords,  most  intellectual  of  assemblies, 
simple  in  exposition,  humorous  even  to  the 
grotesque  in  illustration,  direct  and  candid  in 
argument,  master  of  the  gibe  that  shrivels  an 
enemy  and  enheartens  friends —gifts  much 
less  than  these  have  sufficed  Prime  Ministers  in 
the  past.  He  is  a  convinced  Coalitionist,  but 
he  shares  the  opinion  of  those  who  hold  that 
the  present  Government  is  not  the  only  or  the 
final  form  that  Coalition  can  take.  He  is  a 
close  personal  and  political  friend  of  Mr. 
Winston  Churchill,  and  the  two  are  credited 
with  many  schemes  for  the  remodelling  of 
politics.  In  familiar  intercourse  of  this  kind, 
the  boundaries  between  mere  idle  speculation 
and  actual  plotting  are  somewhat  hard  to 
define,  and  rumour  has  from  time  to  time  made 
itself  very  busy  with  their  political  ambitions. 
But  Lord  Birkenhead's  ambition  is  more  subtle 
than  that  of  becoming  Prime  Minister.  It  is 
to  make  himself  master  of  a  new  House  of 
Lords,  capable  after  reform  of  acting  as 
authoritative  censor  of  both  political  parties, 
to  use  it  as  the  instrument  of  Tory  democracy, 
as  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  failed  to  do  with 
the  Commons,  and  to  best  the  platform  of 
demagogy  of  which  his  early  political  career 
was  a  half-conscious  satire,  by  a  progressive 
statesmanship  of  the  Woolsack. 


LORD  DERBY 


Lord  Derby. 


[C.N.A.         \ 


XV 

LORD    DERBY 

THE  Derby  family  is  the  most  powerful 
territorial  influence  left  in  England. 
There  is  usually  a  Stanley  Member  for 
Preston ;  Knowsley,  the  family's  big  house,  is 
almost  a  suburb  of  Liverpool ;  Bootle  is  theirs, 
and  a  great  deal  of  land  on  the  north  side  of 
Manchester ;  they  were  once  Kings  in  Man, 
and  all  over  South  Lancashire  the  Derby  name 
is  much  affected  by  public-houses  for  their 
signboards  and  by  fond  mothers  for  their 
first-born.  In  London  the  Grosvenors  and 
Russells  count  for  nothing  among  the  electors, 
but  let  no  one  suppose  that  the  Derby  family 
influence  in  Lancashire  is  the  feudalism  that 
still  lingers  on  in  South  Cheshire  and  Shrop- 
shire. It  is  mainly  urban  and  expresses  itself 
as  a  purely  political  rather  than  a  social  force. 
It  is  the  irritant  within  the  oyster  round  which 
the  pearls  of  Lancashire  Conservatism  grow. 
It  was  the  great  Earl  of  Derby  who  was  Prime 
Minister  when  Disraeli  brought  in  and  carried 
the  Reform  Bill  to  which  the  industrial  towns 

206 


206  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

owe  most  of  their  votes.  He  described  it  as 
"  a  leap  in  the  dark,"  but  he  was  faithful  to 
the  policy,  and  he  has  been  justified.  The 
Conservative  working-man  is  still  a  great  force 
in  English  politics,  especially  in  the  North. 
Disraeli  discovered  him,  the  Derbys  adopted 
him,  and  feudalism,  driven  out  by  the  front 
door  in  the  industrial  north,  came  in  again  by 
the  back  door,  disguised. 

A  seventeenth  Earl  of  Derby  has  great 
advantages  apart  from  those  conferred  by 
personal  ability.  In  a  venal  world  it  is  the 
greatest  of  assets  that  you  cannot  be  bought, 
and  too  obvious  a  cleverness  would  only  mar 
the  reputation  for  bluff  straightforward  John 
Bullishness  which  you  can  have  for  a  few 
impulsive  indiscretions  and  confirm  by  generous 
apology.  Lord  Derby  in  a  Lords  debate 
during  the  war  threw  doubt  on  the  patriotism 
of  Lord  Ribblesdale.  The  insult,  and  the 
apology  for  it  afterwards,  were  both  so  hand- 
some that  together  they  enhanced  a  reputation. 
A  man  is  forgiven  for  not  always  meaning  what 
he  says  if  he  is  thought  always  to  say  what  he 
means.  A  seventeenth  earl  who  gets  that 
character,  and  also  has  ambition,  starts  political 
life  with  an  enviable  capital. 

It  is  now  abundantly  clear  that  Lord  Derby 
has  political  ambition.     In  1911,  when  he  was 


LORD    DERBY  207 


distributing  prizes  at  a  technical  school  in 
Nelson,  he  told  the  boys  how  important  it  was 
to  have  an  aim  in  life.  He  himself  had  started 
with  two  ambitions — ^to  win  the  Derby,  and  be 
Prime  Minister.  Lord  Rosebery  said  it  before 
him,  but  it  was  not  the  less  true  on  that 
account.  He  had  run  second  in  the  Derby, 
and  he  had  been  Lord  Mayor  of  Liverpool  so 
far,  but  he  told  them  he  had  not  done  trying 
for  the  others  yet.  It  is  a  Lancashire  habit, 
when  you  want  to  say  a  thing  without  com- 
mitting yourself  to  it,  to  say  it  jestingly,  and 
to  take  these  observations  literally  may  not  be 
quite  playing  the  game.  Still  there  are  many 
things  more  unlikely  than  that  Lord  Derby 
is  still  hopeful  of  winning  the  Derby,  and  even 
of  becoming  Prime  Minister, 

His  political  career,  though  intermittent,  has 
not  been  by  any  means  undistinguished.  At 
the  Post  Office  he  negotiated  the  agreement  for 
the  purchase  of  the  National  Telephone  Com- 
pany's undertaking ;  also  he  called  the  postal 
servants  "  bloodsuckers."  The  first  showed 
the  buoyant  hopefulness  of  his  temperament, 
the  second  his  courage.  He  had  previously 
been  Chief  Press  Censor  to  Lord  Roberts  in 
South  Africa,  another  example  of  courage,  and 
he  was  later  private  secretary  to  Lord  Roberts, 
whose  views  on  compulsory  military  service  he 


208  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

shared.  In  the  Great  War  he  was  appointed 
Director  of  Recruiting  at  a  time  when  it  was 
obvious  that  we  should  want  all  our  man- 
power, and,  looking  back,  everyone  can  now 
see  that  if  conscription  had  to  come  it  would 
have  been  better  if  we  had  adopted  it  early 
and  openly  (as  they  did  in  America)  instead 
of  slipping  into  it  backwards  as  we  did.  The 
Derby  Scheme  was  the  passage  in  his  life  that 
was  least  like  Lord  Derby  ;  it  was  tactful  when 
bluntness  would  have  been  not  only  more  in 
character,  but  more  helpful ;  it  was  com- 
promising when  no  compromise  was  possible, 
apologetic  when  no  apology  was  needed.  No 
one  can  combine  the  businesses  of  doctor  and 
undertaker  without  exciting  comment,  and 
though  Lord  Derby  honestly  did  his  best  by 
the  voluntary  system,  it  was  the  undertaker 
who  won.  Later  in  the  war  Lord  Derby 
became  British  Ambassador  in  Paris,  and  the 
French  people  like  him  and  he  them.  He 
could  have  had  office  in  the  Coalition  Govern- 
ment, but  declined. 

Lord  Derby  came  home  from  France  not 
because  he  wanted  to  leave  Paris,  but,  as  he 
put  it,  "  to  take  up  again  the  manifold  work 
and  interests  that  I  have  in  this  country." 
By  that  he  probably  meant  to  look  after  the 
fortunes    of    the    Conservative    Party.     Lord 


LORD    DERBY  209 


Derby  believes  in  Coalition,  but  it  must  be 
Coalition  inside  his  party,  and  when  he  came 
back  from  Paris  it  was  to  take  steps  so  that 
his  party  should  digest  the  Coalition,  not  the 
Coalition  it.  The  Liberal  wing  of  the  Coalition 
have  frequently  accused  Mr.  Bonar  Law  of 
clipping  the  wings  of  Mr.  Lloyd  George's 
Radicalism.  Lord  Derby  is  one  of  the 
Coalitionists  who  think  that  Mr.  Bonar  Law 
has  conceded  too  much  of  the  essence  of  Con- 
servatism to  his  alliance  with  Mr.  Lloyd 
George.  He  was  a  rebel  against  the  conquest  of 
the  Conservative  Party  by  the  ideas  of  Joseph 
Chamberlain,  and  now  that  they  have  fallen 
into  disrepute,  would  like  to  enthrone  a  new 
Tory  democracy  on  the  throne  vacated  by  the 
Cecils.  He  is  the  antipole  to  those  Coalition- 
ists who  look  forward  to  a  transfer,  some  time 
or  other,  of  its  goodwill  to  a  new  Liberal 
Party.  Whether  it  is  called  Liberal,  or 
National  Democratic,  or  Centre,  is  a  mere 
detail  to  these  people ;  the  point  is  that  it 
shall  be  Liberal  in  inspiration  and  shall  take 
over  as  many  Conservatives  as  can  be 
managed. 

Conversely  with  Lord  Derby  the  point  is 

that  it  shall  be  Conservative  in  inspiration  and 

bring  over  as  many  Liberals  as  like  to  come. 

He  recognises  the  need  of  his  party  for  new 

14. 


210  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

blood,  and  he  has  a  very  sincere  admiration 
for  Mr.  Lloyd  George.  "  Have  we  not  taken 
Mr.  Lloyd  George  in  ?  "  he  asked  not  long 
ago,  "  or "  (a  characteristic  trick,  this,  of 
buttoning  his  foil  with  a  jest)  "has  he  taken 
us  in  ?  " 

Lord  Derby  is  not  so  sure,  and  his  uncertainty 
explains  why  he  has  come  back  to  England. 
"  There  are  the  two  Cecils,"  one  can  imagine 
him  saying  on  his  way  back,  "  gone  over  to 
the  Liberals  and  the  Front  Opposition  Bench, 
Balfour  diffusing  blessings  out  of  the  sunset, 
Bonar  Law  and  all  the  bright  new  planets  of 
the  Conservative  Party  revolving  in  the  Lloyd 
George  orbit.  Chamberlain  unpopular.  Long 
gone,  Sutherland  organising  Liberal  Coalition 
forces  so  as  to  negotiate  with  us  on  equal  terms  I 
Time  someone  came  back  to  look  after  things. 
So  here  am  I,  Rupert  of  honest  party  strife, 
autochthonous  but  progressive  Tory,  with  keys 
to  the  mind  of  Lancashire,  and  everything 
handsome  about  me."  It  is  a  piquant  situa- 
tion, and  one  that  will  provide  much  of  the 
interest  in  the  next  evolution  of  our  domestic 
parties. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  the  return  of  Lord 
Derby  has  been  without  effect.  The  speech  of 
the  Prime  Minister  about  the  Labour  Party 
coincided  with  the  pre-Sessional  rumours   of 


LORD    DERBY  211 


Conservative  disgruntlement,  and  may  have 
had  no  connection  with  Lord  Derby's  return. 
But  the  Tory  revolt  of  the  spring,  quelled  by 
Mr.  Bonar  Law  at  the  time,  revived  in  the 
summer,  and  this  time  there  was  no  doubt  that 
Lord  Derby  was  at  the  back  of  it.  On  two  or 
three  issues  of  policy.  Lord  Derby  has  taken  a 
strong  line.  He  knows  Lancashire,  which  is 
nervous  about  all  interferences  with  fiscal 
policy,  and  he  is  very  anxious  that  the  Con- 
servative Party  should  not  be  wagged  by  its 
Protectionist  zealots.  He  it  was  who  got  the 
taxation  of  food  thrown  out  of  the  official 
policy  of  the  Unionist  Party,  and  it  was  at  a 
breakfast  at  his  house  that  the  compromises 
were  arranged  which  made  it  possible  for  some 
Lancashire  Free  Traders,  Liberal  and  Con- 
servative, to  support  or,  at  any  rate,  to  shrug 
their  shoulders  at  the  Safeguarding  of  Industries 
Bill.  Secondly,  he  does  not  want  all  the 
discredit  of  Irish  coercion  to  be  put  on  the 
Conservatives  and  all  the  credit  of  a  settlement 
on  the  Liberal  Coalitionists,  and  his  visit  to 
Dublin  as  "  Mr.  Edwards,"  if  it  did  nothing 
else,  at  any  rate  pegged  out  a  claim  for 
prestige  in  the  event  of  Ulster  and  Sinn 
Fein  reconciling  their  differences.  Lastly, 
and  more  important.  Lord  Derby  is  for  an 
alliance  with  France,  and  if  there  is  a  split 


212  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

between  him  and  the  Prime  Minister,  it 
may  be  on  that  score.  With  all  his  bluffness 
he  has  a  very  shrewd  sense  of  party  tactics. 
He  is  watching  and  he  is  a  man  to  be 
watched. 


MR.  BRACE 
AND  OTHERS 


[Farringdon  Piwto  Co. 


Mr.    William    Brace. 


XVI 
MR.  BRACE  AND  OTHERS 

THE  dour  Mr.  Adamson,  impressivist 
Mr.  Thomas,  Mr.  Clynes  the  earnest, 
and  Mr.  Arthur  Henderson,  debonair 
and  styled  in  manner,  are  only  some  of  the 
Labour  men  on  the  Front  Opposition  Bench. 
Two  of  the  best  have  gone —  Mr.  Will  Crooks — 
very  infirm  of  late,  silent  but  characterful — 
into  retirement,^  and  Mr.  Brace  into  the 
Ministry  of  Mines. 

Mr.  Brace  had  much  the  best  Parliamentary 
manner  of  them  all.  Ex-Guardsman  and  ex- 
hewer,  beautiful  in  the  curl  alike  of  his  mous- 
taches and  his  sentences,  he  is  a  real  strategist 
in  argument,  and  has  a  vigorous  and  indepen- 
dent mind.  His  speech  on  the  coal  strike  in 
1920  was  one  of  the  cleverest  things  ever  done 
in  the  Commons,  and  was  quite  sensibly,  as 
one  heard  it,  making  history.  His  departure 
is  a  great  loss  to  the  debating  power  of  the 
Labour  benches,  and  one  is  tempted  to  wish 
that  Mr.   Hartshorn,   also  a  man  of  marked 

1  Mr.  Crooks  has  since  died. 
215 


216  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

ability,  but  of  a  different  kind  that  might  have 
excelled  in  administration,  could  have  gone  to 
the  Ministry  of  Mines  and  Mr.  Brace  stayed  in 
the  House.  Deans  have  been  heard  to  com- 
plain of  the  competition  of  the  working-classes 
in  schools  and  professions.  But  how  much 
bitterer  and  juster  the  complaint  of  the  work- 
ing-classes of  the  wholesale  pillage  of  their 
talents.  It  is  a  modern  illustration  to  the 
story  of  the  tyrant  and  the  tall  poppies. 

The  Labour  men  badly  need  a  real  leader, 
and  Mr.  Ramsay  MacDonald  (whose  return 
is  constantly  postponed)  is  the  type  of  man 
that  the  party  needs  for  its  Parliamentary 
efficiency,  though  perhaps  not  for  its  political 
progress  in  the  country.  If  Mr.  Adamson,  the 
present  leader,  were  a  duke,  no  one  would 
listen  to  him  at  all,  and  it  saddens  one  to  think 
of  Jaures  in  France  and  Vandervelde  in  Bel- 
gium, and  then  to  have  to  sit  down  to  Mr. 
Adamson' s  plate  of  thick  porridge — there 
always  seems  such  a  lot  of  it.  The  Labour 
Party,  at  a  great  crisis  in  its  history  like  this, 
should  not  do  these  things. ^ 

Mr.  Clynes  is  a  man  of  a  very  different  type. 
Obviously  of  Manchester,  he  has  a  close  and 
intimate  style  of  argument  and  he  is  one  of  the 
few  Labour  Members— Mr.  William  Graham, 

1  Mr.  Adamson  has  been  succeeded  as  leader  by  Mr.  Clynes. 


MR.    BRACE    AND    OTHERS  217 

not  yet  of  the  Front  Bench,  is  another — who 
can  put  themselves  at  another  point  of  view 
than  his  own,  which  is  the  beginning  of  per- 
suasion. Always  thoughtful  and  sure  of  a 
good  audience,  he  lacks  strength,  and  has  not 
the  overbearing  quality  of  a  leader.  Mr. 
Henderson,  again,  strikes  one,  with  his  pleasant 
manner  and  agreeable  fluency,  as  the  sort  of 
man  who  is  good  except  at  a  pinch.  Mr. 
Thomas  is  of  the  confidential,  mysterious,  and 
accommodating  type,  and  gives  one  the  impres- 
sion that  he  only  drops  his  h's  to  disarm  the 
suspicions  of  the  proletariat.  But  he  is  un- 
doubtedly a  man  who  can  conceive  and  hold  a 
big  idea  and  give  it,  on  occasion,  strong  and 
appropriate  expression.  Nor  should  one  forget 
Mr.  Tom  Shaw,  who  also  speaks  from  the 
Front  Bench,  and  much  too  rarely. 

What  is  wrong  with  the  Labour  Party  ? 
When  one  has  to  catalogue  its  men  in  this  way, 
and  sees  so  much  to  interest  and  like  without 
finding  The  Man,  it  is  a  sign  that  the  party  has 
not  found  itself,  and  that  its  policy  is  still  only 
tentative  and  dissipated  with  tendencies.  The 
superficial  fault  is  that  most  of  it  has  still  to 
master  the  science  of  Parliamentary  procedure. 
The  number  of  effectives  in  the  Irish  Nationalist 
Party  is  three,  or  perhaps  four,  but  they  can 
manage  to  get  a  debate  about  Ireland  two  or 


218  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

three  times  a  week,  usually  against  the  will  of 
the  vast  majority,  and  there  is  no  end  to  the 
irrelevancies  that  they  make  relevant  and  to 
the  runs  they  steal.  Hardly  a  single  Labour 
Member  has  developed  the  art,  although  their 
subject,  one  would  have  thought  from  the 
number  and  complication  of  its  details,  ought 
to  be  inexhaustible  in  its  opportunities. 

One  explanation  is  that  the  deep  and  close 
study  of  the  rules  of  Parliament  is  a  tradition 
that  has  come  down  from  Parnell's  day,  and 
that  the  Labour  men  are  still  amateurs  at  the 
game,  throwing  away  opportunities  wholesale. 
The  party  certainly  wants  a  coach,  preferably 
an  Irishman ;  and  if  we  could  only  get  Home 
Rule  working  in  Ireland  we  should  get  Irishmen 
here,  not  as  Catholics  and  Protestants,  or 
Nationalists  and  Unionists,  but  as  Tories, 
Liberals,  and  Labour  men,  to  the  great  gain  of 
all  three  parties,  but  especially  of  the  last.  For 
the  Irishman  has  undoubtedly  a  racial  gift  for 
Parliamentary  politics i  It  must  be  remem- 
bered, in  fairness  to  the  Labour  men,  that  the 
game  is  played  with  words,  and  that  the 
normal  training  of  the  bourgeoisie  is  in  words 
and  of  the  working-classes  in  things.  You 
hear  good  casual  gibes  and  retorts  from  the 
Labour  benches,  and  sometimes  a  good  set 
speech,  though  it  tends  to  sound  like  an  essay. 


MR.    BRACE    AND    OTHERS  219 

But  the  rapid  cut-and-thrust  of  argument,  the 
exploitation  of  a  mistake  made  by  the  other 
side,  the  clever  adaptation  of  an  argument  to 
the  changes  of  mood  and  situation — everything, 
in  fact,  that  makes  the  soul  of  a  debate — in 
these  matters  the  Labour  Party  is,  as  a  rule, 
quite  helpless.  You  hear  the  clank  of  the 
chains  as  they  talk,  and  against  their  nimbler 
antagonists  they  think  of  the  appropriate 
repartee  four  or  five  sentences  too  late. 

It  is  not  lack  of  ability,  as  is  often  said,  for 
though  there  are  no  men  among  them  of  more 
than  ordinary  stature,  they  are  not  below  the 
average.  What  is  wrong,  and  responsible 
most  of  all  for  their  poor  show  as  debaters,  is 
their  lack,  or  confusion,  of  ideas  which,  in 
Labour  politics,  as  in  most  other  things,  is 
due  to  a  lack  of  liberty.  They  have  got  hold 
of  a  theory  of  State  Socialism  which  is  not 
only  shallow,  but  is  hopelessly  out  of  tune 
both  with  the  facts  and  with  the  sentiment  of 
the  time.  The  supremacy  of  the  idea  of  State 
Socialism  in  Labour  politics  passed  with  the 
defeat  of  Germany,  for  it  means  multiplication 
of  officials  who  are  hated,  growth  of  expendi- 
ture which  is  undermining  the  basis  of  industry, 
and  destruction  of  individual  initiative. 

The  remarkable  arrest  in  the  prestige  of  the 
Labour  Party  is  due  to  the  paralysis  that  the 


220  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

persistent  advocacy  of  a  discredited  and 
impracticable  panacea  induces  in  thought. 
How  can  Labour  thought  be  mobile  and  free 
when  all  the  roads  must  lead  to  Marx  ?  How 
can  it  gain  in  popular  favour  when,  at  a  time 
like  this,  the  upshot  of  its  every  argument, 
avowed  or  not,  is  that  you  must  have  more 
officials  and  more  public  expenditure  ?  When 
the  Socialists  captured  the  Labour  Represen- 
tation Committee,  which  was  the  father  of 
the  present  Labour  Party,  their  contribution 
was  that  they  had  a  remedy  for  one  and  every 
evil,  namely,  that  the  State  should  buy, 
administer,  or  work  something.  They  supplied 
the  trade  unions  with  a  political  programme  at 
a  time  when  they  did  not  know  quite  what  they 
wanted,  and  it  was  something  different  from 
what  the  other  parties  had  to  offer  and  it 
sounded  "  advanced."  Since  then  the  world 
has  turned  round.  The  world  has  had  in  the 
war  a  vast  experiment  in  State  Socialism,  and 
is  frightened  of  it.  The  idea  that  then  was 
"  advanced  "  is  now  seen  to  be  retrograde. 

The  party  will  never  do  anything  with  this 
German-Jewish  tin-can  of  State  Socialism  tied 
to  its  tail.  The  cause  of  the  comparative 
unpopularity  of  sermons  is  that,  though  they 
command  a  general  measure  of  approval,  their 
conclusions    are    always    known    beforehand. 


MR.    BRACE    AND    OTHERS  221 

How  much  more  unfortunate  than  parsons  are 
those  pohtieians  whose  conclusions  are  not  only- 
known  beforehand  but  generally  reprobated. 
To  be  just  to  the  Labour  Party,  they  have 
lately  shown  a  tendency  to  get  away  from  the 
barren  formulae  of  State  Socialism.  The  kind 
of  nationalisation  that  was  advocated  for  the 
mines,  for  example,  was  not  State  Socialism 
at  all,  but  more  like  syndicalism,  contemplating 
as  it  did  a  form  of  joint  ownership,  in  which 
the  State  was  only  one  of  three  partners.  This 
is  a  wholesome  tendency  of  the  new  Labour 
thought,  and  when  it  has  been  worked  out  it 
will  make  a  great  difference  both  to  Labour 
power  in  Parliament  and  to  the  help  that  they 
can  give  in  the  solution  of  our  troubles. 

State  Socialism  is  no  more  a  distinctively 
Labour  doctrine  than  is  Toryism.  It  follows 
that  Socialism,  as  such,  should  be  cut  off  from 
the  Labour  Party  and  become  an  independent 
party  It  will  be  much  better  for  Socialism, 
as  Herr  Ledebour  used  to  argue  against  Mr. 
Ramsay  MacDonald,  for  it  will  then  have  a 
chance  as  a  highly  intellectual  political  creed. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  will  be  better  for  the 
Labour  Party,  too,  which  then  will  be  free  to 
get  to  grips  with  practical  politics. 

There  are  many  directions  in  which  Labour 
thought  would  be  free  to  develop  and  justify 


222  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

its  existence  as  a  strong  and  independent  party, 
capable  on  occasion  of  taking  office.  There  are 
the  early  ideas  of  co-partnership  and  profit- 
sharing  ;  there  are  Guild  Socialism  and  Syndi- 
calism ;  there  is  the  tremendous  problem,  as 
interesting  and  vital  to  the  welfare  of  Labour 
as  of  Capital,  of  increased  efficiency.  Sort 
out  the  speeches  made  from  the  Labour  benches 
this  last  Session,  empty  them  of  generalities, 
and  imagine  them  made  each  from  one  or  other 
of  these  points  of  view,  and  what  a  wonderful 
difference  in  relevancy  and  practicality  there 
would  be  1 


LORD  CARSON 


Lord  Carson. 


XVII 
LORD    CARSON 

OF  all  the  great  men  in  English  history, 
Gladstone  was  surely  the  worst  judge 
of  political  human  nature.  Before  he 
introduced  his  first  Home  Rule  Bill  he  is  said 
to  have  felt  quite  sure  about  Chamberlain 
and  very  doubtful  about  Harcourt.  Some 
overtures  for  support  he  did  make  to  English 
Conservatives,  but  Irish  Conservatives  he 
ignored  and,  what  was  still  more  remarkable, 
he  forgot  Ulster,  then  a  Liberal  stronghold. 

To  an  ordinary  man,  it  would  have  been 
an  obvious  counsel  of  prudence  to  sound  Ulster 
and,  if  possible,  persuade  her  beforehand.  Had 
he  done  so  and  met  with  any  measure  of 
success,  the  first  Home  Rule  Bill  would  have 
been  a  better  Bill  than  his  own,  and  had  even 
more  Home  Rule  in  it,  for  the  only  way  of 
reconciling  Ulster  to  the  idea  of  Home  Rule  for 
Ireland  was  then,  as  now,  by  the  offer  of  Home 
Rule  to  herself.  In  fact,  it  would  have  been 
a  Bill  on  the  same  general  lines  as  the  Act  now 
in  force.     Had  such  a  Bill  been  introduced  a 

15  225 


226  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

generation  ago,  the  North  and  South  would  by 
this  time  have  composed  their  differences ; 
Irish  poHtics  would  have  been  running  on  the 
same  wholesome  differences  between  Liberal, 
Labour,  and  Conservative  that  divide  opinion 
in  other  countries,  instead  of  following  the 
wholly  unnatural  divisions  of  geography  and 
religious  faith ;  there  would  have  been  no 
rebellions  ;  and  Lord  Carson  (the  familiar  "  Sir 
Edward  "  is  still  hard  to  merge  in  the  new 
title),  if  he  had  not  developed  into  a  Grattan, 
would  have  been,  at  any  rate,  Lord  Chancellor 
of  a  united  Ireland. 

Alas,  the  Conservatives  were  the  first  to 
understand  Ulster,  and  Mr.  Balfour  was  the 
first  to  recognise  the  gifts  of  Lord  Carson. 

The  mean  and  unworthy  estimate  of 
Lord  Carson's  character,  though  it  can  be 
made  to  fit  in  with  a  great  many  facts,  is  the 
wrong  one,  and  it  is  not,  in  reality,  that  of 
Ireland  generally.  He  is  not  an  Ulsterman, 
though  he  speaks  for  Ulster  ;  though  narrow 
he  can  be  generous ;  he  is  free  from  the 
religious  bigotry  which  is  the  curse  of  Northern 
Ireland  ;  he  has  the  brogue,  not  of  Belfast,  but 
of  Gal  way,  the  most  beautiful  of  all  the  monu- 
ments of  melancholy  in  Ireland  ;  and  he  loves 
his  country — not  part  of  it  merely,  but  the 
whole.     It  is  one  of  the  tragedies  of  Irish  history 


LORD    CARSON  227 


that  his  gifts  should  have  been  at  the  service 
of  half  a  province  instead  of  the  cause  of 
united  Ireland,  and  there  are  times  when  one 
suspects  that  he  feels  it  as  tragedy  of  his  own 
life  too.  For  no  one  has  heard  him  replying 
to  Mr.  Asquith  on  a  question  of  Irish  policy 
without  suspecting  that,  apart  from  the  specific 
disagreement  of  the  moment,  there  is  deep  down 
in  his  nature  a  feeling  of  personal  resentment 
against  official  Liberalism  for  warping  his 
nature  and  twisting  the  sort  of  work  that  he 
might  have  done  for  Ireland. 

Between  him  and  the  remnant  of  Irish 
Nationalists  in  the  House  there  was  no  such 
gulf.  They  belaboured  each  other,  but  with  it 
all  there  was  some  understanding  and  a  great 
deal  of  respect,  and  of  Sir  Edward  Carson,  when 
he  was  organising  rebellion  in  Ulster,  there  was 
far  more  popular  admiration  even  in  the  rest 
of  Ireland  than  there  was  in  all  England,  outside 
Liverpool  and  the  Carlton  Club.  But  in  every 
gesture  towards  the  official  Liberal  benches 
there  is  the  same  accusation  of  faithlessness 
— "  We  were  yours  and  you  cast  us  off " — a 
charge  that  cannot  be  brought  against  Nation- 
alism or  Sinn  Fein. 

One  ought  not  to  ignore  this  grievance  of 
Lord  Carson  as  a  good  Irishman  against 
the    blundering    tactics    of    Gladstone    which 


228  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

presented  him  with  it,  for,  rightly  handled,  the 
question  of  Home  Rule  in  1886  was  far  easier 
than  now,  and  might  have  been  solved.  But 
if  he  has  a  grievance,  so  have  others  —  England 
and  Ireland  both — against  him.  He  did  not 
teach  Ireland  to  rebel,  but  he  led  the  only 
successful  rebellion  she  has  made,  and  the 
lesson  was  not  lost.  Ireland  as  a  whole,  too, 
has  a  grievance  against  him  as  a  lost  leader  of 
union. 

The  most  dramatic  apparition  to  be  seen  in 
the  House  of  Commons  has  until  the  other  day 
been  that  of  Lord  Carson  at  the  door  when 
an  Irish  debate  was  proceeding.  Especially 
now,  with  the  Irish  Nationalist  Party  a 
mere  twittering  ghost  of  its  former  great- 
ness, there  is  always  an  element  of  theatri- 
cality in  Irish  debates ;  someone  said  once 
that  there  ought  to  be  a  row  of  footlights 
all  round  the  Irish  coast.  It  may  be  the 
theatricality  of  Irish  debate,  or  there  may  be 
some  positive  suggestion  in  the  tall,  lank 
figure,  the  straight  black  hair,  the  hollow 
cheeks,  and  the  lengthened  chin,  but  one  could 
not  help  thinking  of  Mephisto  in  the  play  at 
such  times. 

And  the  impression  is  not  removed  by  the 
rich  brogue  and  is  deepened  by  the  corrosion 
and  negation  of  what  he  says.     Nothing  in 


LORD    CARSON  229 


politics  seems  worth  while  when  he  speaks  ; 
Irish  ideals  are  balloons  blown  up  with  gas  ; 
a  new  thought  or  hope  is  treated  like  a  hostile 
witness  ;  the  great  world  pines  to  the  dimen- 
sions of  a  poky  court  of  justice,  and  nothing 
seems  to  matter  but  what  is  concrete  enough 
to  be  put  into  an  affidavit.  It  is  all  mag- 
nificently done,  for  Lord  Carson  has  not 
risen  on  nothing  to  the  position  of  perhaps 
the  most  famous  of  living  advocates.  He  has 
in  a  supreme  degree  the  faculty  of  dissolving 
a  state  of  mind  into  little  crystals  of  fact  and 
holding  each  up  to  the  light  that  is  appropriate 
to  his  purpose.  No  one  in  our  time  at  the 
Bar  has  had  his  power  of  unexpected  thrust 
and  stab  in  cross-examination,  and  he  has  so 
cultivated  the  habit  of  always  speaking  at  the 
greatest  common  measure  of  intelligence  in  a 
jury  that  he  has  lost  the  power  of  rising  above 
it.  Outside  Irish  affairs  -  for  example,  on 
labour  topics —he  speaks  occasionally  with 
flashes  of  originality  and  sentimental  insight, 
but  ordinarily  on  politics  he  is  a  barrister  whose 
rare  distinction  of  manner  cannot  disguise  the 
mediocrity  and  dullness  of  what  he  has  to  say. 
If  Lord  Carson  had  never  turned  rebel, 
popular  opinion  would  have  neglected  him  as  a 
politician  ;  but  his  organisation  of  the  con- 
tingent rebellion  in  the  North  of  Ireland  made 


230  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

him  a  scoundrel  in  the  eyes  of  many  and  a  hero 
with  others,  and  with  nearly  all  profoundly 
modified  the  estimates  of  his  character.  A  few, 
indeed,  there  were  who  still  refused  to  take  his 
politics  seriously  ;  to  them  he  was  still  a  stage 
Irishman  only,  bedadding  and  bejabering,  even 
when  he  was  talking  hypothetical  treason  and 
civil  war. 

In  fact,  his  action  at  this  time  proved  the 
exact  contrary.  It  may  not  have  been  a  great 
thing  for  him  at  his  time  of  life  to  throw  up  an 
exceedingly  lucrative  practice  and  devote  him- 
self entirely  to  the  work  of  organising  resistance 
to  the  enforcing  of  the  Home  Rule  Act.  But 
it  was  a  great  thing  for  him  to  run  the  risk 
of  arrest  and  the  social  disgrace,  not  to  speak 
of  the  physical  danger,  of  being  a  rebel.  It 
was  proof  that  he  really  cared,  that  his  denun- 
ciation of  Home  Rule  was  the  outcome  of  real 
conviction,  and  even  that  he  had  the  stuff  of 
martyrdom  in  him.  There  is  no  exaggerating 
the  mischief  that  was  done  to  the  country  by 
the  formation  of  the  Ulster  army  ;  but  when 
all  is  said,  it  is  a  test  of  sincerity  that  a  man 
should  in  the  last  resort  be  prepared  to  fight 
in  a  cause  of  conscience  when  he  is  convinced 
that  no  other  honourable  issue  is  possible. 
And  by  that  test  the  Government  of  the  day 
which    did    not    arrest    Sir    Edward    Carson 


LORD    CARSON  231 

stands  condemned  in  its  Irish  policy.  What- 
ever Irish  poHcy  was  to  be  adopted  later,  it 
must  inevitably  after  that  be  a  policy  that 
did  not  involve  the  coercion  of  Ulster,  and  to 
have  established  that  principle,  if  a  negative 
achievement,  redeems  his  political  career  from 
barrenness  and  contempt. 

Lord  Carson  might  have  done  still  more 
and  achieved  political  greatness  had  he,  after 
this  victory,  known  how  to  use  it  for  the 
service  of  all  Ireland.  For  now  because 
rather  than  in  spite  of  the  war  -was  the  time 
to  achieve  the  unity  of  Ireland,  and  Lord 
Carson,  by  close  co-operation  with  the 
Unionists  of  the  rest  of  Ireland,  if  not  with 
the  Nationalists  too,  might  have  achieved  that 
end.  The  opportunity  was  neglected  and 
Lord  Carson  remained  the  leader  of  a  pro- 
vince when  he  might  have  been  so  much 
more.  The  truth  was  —and  his  brief  tenure  of 
office  during  the  war  confirms  it — that  he  is 
quite  without  constructive  ability  of  any  kind. 
Absolutely  dependent  on  others  for  his  general 
ideas,  he  might  have  served  a  greater  cause 
than  that  of  Ulster  had  he  fallen  early  under 
the  right  influences.  But  the  official  Liberal 
Party  first  neglected  him  and  then  abused 
him,  as  it  did  Chamberlain  and  later  (so 
far    as    the    abuse    went    at    any    rate)    Mr, 


232  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Lloyd  George,  and  he  never  realised  all  of 
which  he  might  have  been  capable.  There 
were  also  faults  of  temperament  as  well  as  of 
mind.  For  all  that  is  said  of  his  personal 
kindliness  and  good-nature,  there  are  hundreds 
of  instances  that  might  be  quoted  in  support, 
and  the  caricaturists  who  see  the  man  with  the 
Red  Indian  profile  and  the  combative  jaws 
see  less  than  strangers  who,  meeting  him  for 
the  first  time,  are  fascinated  by  the  dark 
melancholy  of  the  eyes.  He  is  a  man  of  a  deep 
emotional  nature,  and  the  show  of  truculence 
is  only  the  protective  hardening  of  a  skin  that 
is  more  tender  than  most  people's.  But  there 
are  some  humans— perhaps  more  numerous  in 
Ireland  than  elsewhere — whose  devotion  to 
those  who  depend  on  them  takes  the  form  of 
intense  distrust  and  ferocity  towards  every- 
one else.  They  rend  and  tear,  not  out  of 
cruelty  but  out  of  a  too  restricted  and,  as 
it  were,  provincial  range  of  affection.  Lord 
Carson  was  of  these,  and  the  fact  ruined  him 
as  a  national  politician. 


CAPTAIN   ELLIOT 


[Vandyk 


Captain  Elliot. 


XVIII 
CAPTAIN    ELLIOT 

IF  it  be  objected  that  Captain  Elliot  re- 
sembles a  stalagmite  rather  than  a 
pillar  that  supports  the  roof  of  the 
State,  the  answer  is  he  is  only  young  yet,  andi 
that  youth  as  such  has  rights  of  its  own. 
Captain  Elliot  has  turned  thirty  by  a  year  or 
two.  There  are  others  who  are  even  younger, 
but  extreme  youth  tends  to  be  old-fashioned. 
Captain  Elliot,  while  old  enough  not  to  be 
that,  is  still  young  enough  to  realise  that  the 
ends  of  the  next  generation  are  in  the  keeping 
of  him  and  his  likes.  Let  the  future,  therefore, 
redress  the  heavy  balance  that  the  past  has 
had  in  these  pages. 

Captain  Elliot  comes  of  prosperous  yeoman 
stock  in  Lanark,  read  medicine  at  Glasgow 
University  with  some  contemporaries  of 
genius  as  yet  unknown  to  fame,  served  with 
the  Scots  Greys  at  Cambrai  and  other  hot 
places,  and  at  the  end  of  the  war  was  elected 
as  a  Coalition  Unionist.  It  was  a  strange 
choice  for  a  man  of  his  temperament,  but  when 

235 


236  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

reproached  with  his  political  nomenclature,  he 
points  out  that  Unionism  is  not  Conservatism, 
but  includes  Liberal  and  Radical  elements. 
He  came  to  London  thinking  that  he  might 
combine  laboratory  work  with  work  as  a 
Member,  but  Parliament  turned  out  in  his  case 
to  be  a  jealous  mistress,  and  instead  of  walking 
in  hospital  he  is  oftener  flying  in  politics — ^with 
a  preference  for  the  kite  observation  service. 
But  he  retains  his  deep  interest  in  public 
health,  and  he  has  a  room  at  the  Scottish  Office 
by  virtue  of  some  minor  unpaid  post.  In 
appearance  he  is  large  and  unbeautiful,  in  the 
way  of  the  Newfoundland  dog,  and  though, 
like  this  noble  animal,  he  will  sometimes  upset 
social  kickshaws  and  tea-trays  in  a  drawing- 
room  (m.etaphorically  speaking,  of  course),  he 
is  in  much  request  amongst  fashionable  and 
other  people  for  his  gaiety  and  high  spirits, 
and  the  originality  of  his  views.  Yet  he  has 
known  sorrow.  Two  years  ago  he  and  his 
wife  were  on  their  honeymoon  in  Skye,  were 
benighted  in  a  thick  mist  on  a  mountain-side, 
and  fell  down  a  scree.  She  was  killed,  and  he 
escaped  with  injuries  and  a  serious  illness.  As 
always  with  the  perfervid  Scot,  there  are  deep 
and  unsuspected  holes  in  his  nature,  like  the 
lakes  in  his  own  mountains. 

His  speaking  in  the  House,  though  fluent 


CAPTAIN    ELLIOT  237 

and  not  unmelodious,  is  too  much  like  his 
talking  to  be  in  a  good  Parliamentary  manner. 
He  has  none  of  the  airs  and  graces  of  debate,  he 
attacks  instead  of  wooing  his  subject,  and  his 
speech  has  the  jerky,  breathless  movement  of 
thought.  Many  people  think  he  is  joking  when 
he  is  merely  exaggerating  an  aspect  of  truth, 
and  several  times  he  has  been  in  danger  of 
acquiring  the  reputation  of  a  humorist,  which 
is  always  fatal  to  solid  success  in  Parliament. 
His  friends  say  that  his  political  gifts  show 
better  in  conversation  than  in  public  speech. 
Certainly  on  his  day,  and  especially  on  his 
night,  he  will  make  political  talk  more 
interesting  than  any  speech  dare  be.  A 
proposition  begun  in  a  quizzical  drawl  will, 
like  a  mountain  stream  issuing  from  a  bog, 
end  in  a  spate.  Paradox  generates  paradox, 
and  yet  they  are  always  relevant  to  the  matter 
in  hand,  never  tangential  nor  idly  discursive. 
He  has  a  Highland  fondness  for  splashing  about 
in  generalities,  but  also  the  Lowlander's 
instinct  for  what  is  practical.  It  is  at  such 
times  that  one  understands  why  his  position 
in  politics  is  higher  than  his  actual  performance 
in  the  House,  though  this  is  not  inconsiderable, 
would  suggest. 

Like  most  men  who  have  seen  much  active 
service  in  the  war.  Captain  Elliot  loathes  the 


238  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

idea  of  human  purification  through  pain  and 
suffering.  He  has  brought  back  from  the 
front  both  the  soldier's  habit  of  jesting  at 
death,  and  a  crusader's  zeal  against  life  that 
is  compounded  of  misery  and  ill-health.  One 
has  often  noted  that  amongst  men  who  have 
seen  dreadful  things  at  the  war.  The  same  man 
will  mockingly  sing  that  cruel  soldier's  ditty  : 

Do  you  want  to  find  your  sweetheart  ? 

I  know  where  he  is :  (tris) 

He's  hanging  on  the  old  barbed  wire. 

(Chorus)  I  saw  him,  I  saw  him, 

Hanging  on  the  old  barbed  wire,  I  saw  him, 
Hanging  on  the  old  barbed  wire — 

and  then  tingle  with  sensibility  over  a  Debussy 
prelude,  and  rebuke  the  stay-at-home's  political 
apathy  to  the  preventible  pain  around  him. 
War  has  with  many  hardened  the  skin 
to  a  carapace,  and  at  the  same  time  softened 
the  heart  beneath.  The  army,  at  any  rate,  is 
not  for  stinting  any  help  that  politics  can  give 
to  the  underdog,  and  in  this  respect  Captain 
Elliot  represents  the  feelings  of  the  younger 
generation. 

The  young  ex- officer  from  the  war,  of  whom 
Captain  Elliot  is  a  type,  has  not  yet  fulfilled 
in  our  politics  all  that  was  expected  of  him. 
The  fertility  and  novelty  of  idea  which  were  so 
fascinating  when  he  was  under  discipline  are 


CAPTAIN    ELLIOT  239 

apt  to  sport  rather  violently  when  that  dis- 
cipline is  removed,  and  from  the  trenches  to 
the  lobbies  is  a  dangerous  transplanting.  But 
ex- officers  like  Coote,  Austin  Hopkinson,  and 
Elliot,  have  brought  into  the  House  some- 
thing that  the  old  regular  army  never  could 
give  it,  and  their  combination  of  boyish 
enthusiasm  with  the  realism  that  comes  of 
looking  death  so  often  in  the  face  may  have 
something  of  permanent  value  for  our  politics. 
Some  examples  may  be  given  of  his  politics, 
because  they  not  only  help  to  explain  him,  but 
show  how  completely  the  war  has  confused 
old  party  lines,  and  how  impossible  it  is  for  a 
realist  to  return  to  the  old  party  allegiance. 
Captain  Elliot  visited  Austria  in  1919,  and 
came  back  with  a  rooted  dislike  of  the  tyranny 
which  the  ideas  of  nationalism  have  exercised 
over  men's  minds  in  the  last  ten  years. 

Tantum  religio  potuit  suadere  malorum 

might  have  been  said,  though  it  was  not,  by 
someone  fresh  back  from  the  Crusades,  and  in 
that  spirit  Captain  Elliot  regarded  the  follies 
of  unchastened  nationalism  in  the  partition  of 
the  old  Austro-Hungarian  Empire.  Perhaps  it 
is  natural  for  Unionism  to  deplore  the  excesses 
of  the  national  spirit,  but  in  his  insistence  that 
economics  are  as  important  a  factor  in  shaping 


240  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

the  life  of  a  state  as  blood  or  language,  he  nearly 
comes  full  cycle  round  to  the  Manchester 
school  and  vindicates  the  reality  of  the 
economic  man,  at  any  rate  in  international 
affairs.  In  the  same  vein  was  an  argument  he 
one  day  developed  in  the  House,  with  the 
experience  of  the  Austro-Hungarian  Empire 
before  him,  against  Home  Rule  for  Scotland 
on  the  ground  that  it  might  impose  delays  in 
transit  between  the  two  countries. 

On  Ireland  and  on  labour  politics,  also. 
Captain  Elliot  showed  that  he  belonged  to  a 
younger  school  which  has  outgrown  the  old 
divisions  of  thought.  His  view  on  Ireland  (and 
that  of  Captain  Coote,  who  works  and  lives 
with  him  in  a  little  house  in  Westminster) — 
was  that,  having  made  up  our  mind  to  give 
Ireland  Home  Rule,  we  ought  to  give  the 
amplest  and  most  generous  measure.  He  was 
prepared  to  allow  Ireland  to  have  its  own 
army  and  navy  even,  and  he  ridiculed  the 
fear  that  it  would  involve  any  risk  to  England. 
"  Are  you  afraid  of  an  Irish  Republic  ?  Why, 
I  should  threaten  them  with  an  Irish  Republic 
if  they  didn't  behave."  He  is  never  tired  of 
developing  the  theme  that  the  Englishman  is 
ridiculously  nervous  and  self-depreciatory,  and 
too  inclined  to  apologise  for  his  existence  in 
the  world.     He  took  an  active  part  in  the  con- 


CAPTAIN    ELLIOT  241 

troversy  on  the  coal  stoppage.  Strongly 
opposed  to  the  miners'  project  of  a  national 
pool,  it  was  he  who  was  responsible  for  Mr. 
Frank  Hodges'  visit  to  the  House  of  Commons, 
which  broke  up  the  Triple  Alliance. 

It  is  too  early  yet  to  prophesy  the  future 
political  development  of  Captain  Elliot,  but 
that  with  reasonable  luck  (and  luck  plays  a 
great  part  in  politics  as  in  war)  he  will  take  a 
prominent  place  some  day  seems  in  the  highest 
degree  likely.  It  may  be  that  he  will  attach 
himself  to  a  new  and  improved  Liberal  Party. 
He  may  join  a  new  school  of  Unionist 
Coalition,  such  as  Lord  Birkenhead  and  Mr. 
Churchill  might  conceivably  head.  Certain 
it  is  both  that  he  has  no  sympathy  with  Lord 
Derby's  Conservatism,  and  that  his  early  enthu- 
siasm for  the  present  Coalition  is  weaker.  But 
settlement  comes  late  in  political  life — some- 
times it  does  not  come  at  all — and  the  straightest 
minds  will  execute  the  strangest  curves  be- 
tween youth  and  maturity.     So  may  his. 


16 


PARLIAMENTARY 
GOVERNMENT 


POSTSCRIPT 

THE  FUTURE  OF  PARLIAMENTARY 
GOVERNMENT 

DEMOCRATIC  government  in  England  is 
passing  through  a  crisis  of  which  the 
country  is  only  vaguely  conscious.  It 
feels  that  constitutional  changes  are  in  progress, 
but  it  ascribes  the  causes  of  discontent  to  decay 
in  the  quality  of  Members  of  Parliament  or  to 
increasing  selfishness  and  lack  of  principle 
amongst  its  leaders.  Neither  explanation  is 
true,  either  in  fact  or  as  a  diagnosis.  The 
trouble  goes  much  deeper  than  any  defects  in 
personnel.  Indeed,  despite  the  popular  belief, 
the  personnel  alike  of  the  Government  and  of 
Parliament  at  this  time  is  far  above  the  average. 
We  have  a  Prime  Minister  who  has  certainly 
more  genius  for  politics  than  anyone  in  English 
history  since  Chatham,  and  he  has  a  Ministry 
of  All  the  Talents.  Nor  is  Parliament  below  the 
level  of  its  predecessors,  except  in  its  lack  of  an 
Opposition.  That  apart,  it  has  more  than  the 
average  ability,  and  in  elasticity  of  mind  and 
accessibility  to  argument,  two  of  the  greatest 
virtues  a  Commons  can  have,  it  is  easily  first 
in  modern  times.     As  for  honesty,  ninety-nine 

245 


246  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

men  out  of  a  hundred  are  honest,  and  neither 
Ministries  nor  Members  of  Parhament  fall 
below  this  percentage.  Of  all  the  vices  of 
political  discussion,  none  is  so  contemptible  as 
this  habit  of  explaining  political  difficulties  by 
debiting  with  some  moral  kink  those  who  differ 
from  us.  There  is  no  rational  debate  on  politics 
possible  which  does  not  start  from  the  assumption 
that  we  are  all  decent  people,  honestly  desirous 
of  doing  the  best  for  our  country.  Those  who  will 
not  subscribe  to  that  had  better  give  up  politics 
and  turn  mad  fakirs  or  howling  dervishes. 

The  trouble  is  not  in  the  bad  character  of 
politicians,  but  in  the  fact  that  there  are  new 
forces  at  work  of  which  our  intellectual  appre- 
ciation is  still  very  imperfect,  and  if  that  be  so, 
one  has  cause  for  thankfulness  that  our  age  is 
stirring.  It  is  further  evidence  in  addition  to 
that  furnished  by  the  war  that  we  are  far  better 
than  our  fathers,  who  lived  on  the  interpreta- 
tion of  old  ideas  in  politics  and  not  on  the 
fashioning  of  new  ones.  Another  shallow 
diagnosis  is  that  our  troubles  proceed  from  the 
neglect  of  the  old  principle  of  Cabinet  respon- 
sibility under  which  the  Cabinet  thought  and 
acted  as  one  man,  and  the  smallest  act  of  any 
one  department  was  treated  as  the  solemn 
decision  of  the  whole  Cabinet.  The  principle 
is  dead  beyond  hope  or  desert  of  resurrection. 


PARLIAMENTARY  GOVERNMENT        247 

What  is  the  sense  of  expecting  not  only  the 
Prime  Minister,  but  every  other  member  of  the 
Cabinet,  to  know  everything  that  is  happening 
in  every  other  department  ?  Peel,  as  long  ago 
as  1845,  defied  the  Prime  Minister  to  perform 
properly  the  theoretical  duties  of  his  office,  and 
the  duties  of  Government  in  those  days  were 
compared  with  those  of  to-day,  as  a  bow- 
windowed  shop  to  a  vast  emporium.  Besides, 
the  principle  is  fatal  to  Parliamentary  efficiency. 
Parliament  has  some  chance  of  defeating  the 
policy  of  a  single  Minister ;  but  if  he  is  to  be 
sheltered  behind  the  doctrine  of  Cabinet 
responsibility,  its  only  effective  form  of  protest 
against  any  action  is  to  commit  hari-kari. 

The  burden  of  nearly  all  comment  on  the 
British  Parliament  in  the  last  twenty  years  is 
the  growing  power  of  the  Executive,  due  to  the 
stricter  organisation  of  the  party  system,  the 
development  of  the  caucus,  and  so  on.  Un- 
doubtedly, Coalition  has  increased  this  distur- 
bance of  the  balance.  Under  the  old  party 
system,  you  had  at  any  rate  one  party  for 
which  the  Government  could  not  conceivably 
do  right ;  but  now  under  a  Coalition  the  criticism 
of  the  Opposition  is  that  of  a  minority  of  a 
party.  A  huge  Government  maj  ority  is  the  worst 
enemy  of  efficient  Parliamentary  work.  This 
evil,  which  is  indubitable  and  is  as  bad  for  the 


248  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Government  as  for  Parliament,  is  likely  to  be 
cured  before  long,  for  the  Coalition  can  hardly 
remain  on  its  present  basis.  Coalition  in 
some  form  is  the  condition  of  politics  for  the 
next  ten  years  at  least,  for  there  is  as  little  life 
in  pure  official  Conservatism  as  in  official 
Liberalism.  Conservatism,  by  splitting  off 
from  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  would  form  a  party 
little  larger  than  that  of  the  official  Liberals, 
and  for  the  sake  of  the  Coalition  is  it  to  be 
hoped  that,  if  it  proposes  to  obstruct  and  dis- 
tort its  policy,  it  will  split  off  and  lose  no  time 
about  it.  The  future  of  politics  is  with  a  Centre 
composed  of  progressive  Liberals  and  Conser- 
vatives, and  if  possible,  also  of  a  bourgeois 
Labour  group,  for  the  Labour  Party  is  a  very 
artificial  unity,  and  logically  for  Parliamentary 
purposes  ought  to  split  too.  This  Centre  party 
(whatever  its  precise  name  may  be)  might 
have  Liberal  and  Conservative  fringes. 
Opposite  it  would  be  the  bulk  of  the  Labour 
Party.  In  this  sense,  Mr.  Lloyd  George  is 
right  in  envisaging  the  future  of  politics  as  a 
contest  between  the  bourgeois  and  the  Labour 
parties.  Those  Labour  men  who  are  to  be 
detached  are  much  nearer  to  the  Coalition  than 
to  the  Independent  Liberals,  and  the  notion  of 
an  alliance  between  Labour  and  the  Wee  Frees 
is  both  impracticable  and,  if  it  were  practicable, 


PARLIAMENTARY    GOVERNMENT        249 

would  be  suicidal  for  the  Liberals.  The  thing 
to  pray  for  is  a  Coalition  without  its  recalcitrant 
Conservatives  and  with  the  progressive  Wee 
Frees,  with  a  smaller  majority,  and  if  possible 
with  an  alliance  with  the  Labour  right  wing. 

But  this  grouping  and  regrouping  of  political 
parties  is  only  the  froth  on  the  surface.  The 
main  current  of  politics  is,  as  has  already  been 
said  in  these  pages,  towards  a  sort  of  Liberalism, 
not  that  of  the  priests  of  Abingdon  Street,  but 
such  as  Mr.  Lloyd  George,  if  freed  from  his 
entanglements,  might  profess  and  ensue.  But 
underneath  the  main  current  there  are  under- 
currents, and  our  concern  is  rather  with  these. 
For  it  is  of  the  future  of  Parliamentary  rather 
than  of  national  politics  that  we  are  now 
thinking. 

The  strongest  of  these  undercurrents  is  the 
contention  between  Parliamentary  authority 
and  the  representative  system  in  politics  on 
the  one  hand,  and  what  may  be  called  the 
principle  of  direct  action  in  government.  The 
direct  action  party  in  Labour  politics,  which 
seeks  to  accomplish  its  ends  by  economic 
pressure  without  reference  to  the  slower 
methods  of  Parliamentary  persuasion,  everyone 
knows.  But  there  has  grown  up  in  Government 
quarters  a  direct  action  party  which  likes  to 
appeal  to  the  sovereign  people  direct,  through 


250  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

the  Press  now  that  the  platform  is  losing  its 
power,  and  over  the  heads  of  its  constitutional 
representatives  in  the  Commons.  The  extreme 
jealousy  which  Parliament  shows  towards  the 
newspapers  is  not  without  cause,  for  there  has 
been  a  sensible  change  in  the  balance  of  the 
constitution ;  it  is  like  the  old  jealousy  which 
the  senate  had  towards  the  comitia  and  the 
forum  in  the  later  days  of  the  Roman  Republic. 
Between  the  vast  ochlocracy  of  the  electorate 
which  is  easiest  reached  through  the  mega- 
phone of  the  newspapers  and  the  Triumvirate 
of  the  Inner  Cabinet,  the  representative  system 
is  in  danger  of  being  crushed  out.  It  is  some- 
times said  that  when  the  Irish  question  has 
been  settled,  the  last  of  the  old  political  issues 
will  have  disappeared,  and  the  basis  of  political 
controversy  will  be  shifted  definitely  on  to  an 
economic  basis.  But  is  not  this  new  issue 
between  the  representative  system  of  govern- 
ment and  direct  rule  a  political  issue  of  the 
first  constitutional  importance  ? 

The  victory  of  the  representative  system  is 
by  no  means  a  matter  of  course  as  is  generally 
imagined,  for  the  growth  in  the  power  of  the 
Executive  is  one  of  the  commonplaces  of 
politics,  and  the  methods  of  politics  must 
constantly  be  changing  their  mechanism.  The 
printed  word  has  long  been  superior  to  the 


PARLIAMENTARY    GOVERNMENT       251 

spoken,  and  with  universal  education  its 
mastery  has  become  stronger.  Not  only  is  its 
appeal  far  wider,  but  whereas  the  effect  of  a 
speech  is  transient  and  the  atmosphere  of  a 
public  meeting  is  of  all  most  unfavourable  to 
calm  deliberation,  the  printed  word  can  be 
taken  home,  read  a  dozen  times,  and  examined 
in  every  possible  light.  The  public  meeting  is 
already  tending  to  become  obsolescent ;  the 
real  influence  over  an  electorate  is  in  the 
printed  reports  of  a  meeting,  which  are  usually 
very  inadequate,  and  in  the  comments  of  writers. 
It  may  be  that  the  representative  system, 
however  useful  with  a  limited  and  illiterate 
electorate,  may  be  obsolete  in  a  community  in 
which  everyone  can  read.  The  largest  public 
meeting  at  an  election  does  not  exceed  5,000, 
which  is  an  exceedingly  small  circulation  for  a 
newspaper,  and,  moreover,  the  newspaper 
appears  every  day,  whereas,  even  at  times  of 
the  greatest  politcal  excitement,  meetings  that 
appeal  to  a  tithe  of  the  circulation  of  the  good 
daily  can  only  be  addressed  once  a  fortnight  on 
the  average.  It  may  be  that  the  representative 
system  was  only  a  temporary  expedient  adapted 
to  small  electorates  and  an  illiterate  age,  and 
that  the  printing  press  will  transfer  our  politics 
back  to  the  stage  at  which  the  fortunes  of 
nations  were  determined  by  a  forum  speech. 


252  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

The  printing  press,  in  fact,  does  enable  a  pro- 
minent politician  to  gather  forty  million  people 
in  a  forum  and  address  them  as  though  they 
were  a  crowd  of  a  few  hundreds.  True,  the 
words  are  spoken  first,  but  that  is  only  an  acci- 
dent, and  it  is  easy  to  leave  out  the  speech  and 
deliver  it  direct  to  the  Press.  The  future 
politician  may  well  say  to  his  rival,  "  You  may 
hold  all  the  meetings  if  I  can  control  a  few 
newspapers."  This  is  the  real  menace  to  the 
representative  system,  and  to  the  authority  of 
Parliament. 

While  the  printed  word  is  daily  extending 
its  influence,  oratory  has  been  as  steadily 
declining  in  power,  and  the  methods  of  Parlia- 
ment, with  a  few  alterations,  are  what  they  were 
fifty  years  ago.  In  this  unequal  competition 
Parliament  must  sooner  or  later  succumb, 
unless  it  reforms  its  methods,  and  with  it  we 
shall  lose  the  representative  system  and  revert 
to  the  old  methods  of  appeal  to  the  casual  crowd 
in  the  forum,  only  the  appeal  will  be  in  print,  and 
the  forum  at  the  fireside  of  every  elector  who 
can  read.  Already  Parliament  is  dependent 
on  the  publicity  it  receives  in  the  newspapers. 

It  would  be  a  disaster  if  direct  Cabinet,  or 
worse  still  merely  personal,  rule  through  the 
newspapers  were  substituted  for  the  control  of 
Parliament,  for  no  one  can  see  much  of  Parlia- 


PARLIAMENTARY    GOVERNMENT       253 

mentary  work  without  recognising  that,  how- 
ever great  its  imperfections,  it  is  after  all 
superior  as  an  instrument  of  democratic  govern- 
ment to  the  casual  readings  and  ponderings  on 
what  they  read  of  millions  of  separate  electors. 
But  the  tendency  of  the  age  is  very  definite,  and 
it  is  all  against  the  continued  authority  of  Parlia- 
ment, especially  if  this  authority  is  under  any 
suspicion  of  subservience  to  party  or  persons. 

What  are  the  remedies  suggested  for  a  danger 
that  is  grave  and  more  imminent  than  is 
generally  suspected  ?  The  first  is  an  improve- 
ment of  the  House  of  Commons'  methods  of 
doing  its  work.  Question  time  is  the  freshest 
and  liveliest  time  of  the  day,  and  it  ought  to  be 
extended  so  as  to  give  an  opportunity  daily  for 
an  interpellation  or  a  short  debate  on  the 
question  of  the  hour.  Nothing  so  shakes  the 
authority  of  Parliament  as  its  enforced  silence 
on  the  subjects  that  are  most  in  men's  minds. 
Yet  another  and  very  important  change  would 
be  an  extension  of  the  Committee  system, 
which  would  give  Commons  Committees  the 
right  to  call  for  all  relevant  documents,  to 
inspect  and  to  prepare  a  considered  report  on 
every  subject  of  importance,  and  to  give 
independent  guidance  to  the  debate. 

But  there  is  another  and  more  important 
reform  if  Parliament  is  to  maintain  its  con- 


254  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

stitutional  position,  and  the  spoken  word  is 
not  to  be  defeated  by  the  printed  word. 
ParHament  must  act ;  an  opinion  may  be 
ignored  by  a  popular  Press,  but  acts  cannot 
be.  The  strategic  key  of  the  situation  is  the 
right  to  dissolve  Parliament  at  present  possessed 
by  the  Government,  and  the  strongest  of  all 
the  arguments  that  a  Government  can  use 
against  revolt  is  the  threat  that  if  it  is  defeated 
it  will  go  to  the  country.  This  power  must  not 
remain  in  the  hands  of  the  Government  if 
Parliament  is  to  maintain  its  position. 

"Resignation,  nothing  more,  might  be 
borne.  But,  in  fact,  resignation  means  that 
Parliament,  too,  comes  to  an  end — in  other 
words,  that  every  Member  is  fined  £1,000  in 
election  expenses,  and  this  power  of  fine  tells 
heavily  against  the  free  and  independent 
Parliament  that  the  country  wants.  True, 
the  country  sent  them  to  Westminster  to 
support  a  Government  and  a  policy,  but  surely 
with  their  heads  on,  not  without  them.  If 
with  their  heads  on,  they  must  be  free  to  vote 
against  the  Government ;  if  they  are  not  to  be 
free,  Parliament  might  just  as  well  be  a  cash- 
register  with  700-odd  parti- coloured  keys,  a  com- 
plicated mechanical  toy  for  Whips  to  play  with. 

"It  is  not  only  the  financial  fine  that 
matters.     An  honest  vote  on  Ireland,  by  bring- 


PARLIAMENTARY    GOVERNMENT       255 

ing  about  a  General  Election,  may  prejudice 
half  a  dozen  other  reforms  in  which  the  House 
is  interested.  The  independent  Member  has  to 
ask  himself,  '  Shall  I,  by  making,  for  example,  Sir 
Eric  Geddes  as  Minister  of  Transport  impossible, 
or  by  throwing  out  the  E.P.D.,  imperil  a  settle- 
ment in  Ireland  or  a  real  peace  in  Europe  ?  * 
That  sort  of  reflection,  so  fatal  to  real  indepen- 
dence, should  not  perplex  him,  and  would  not 
but  for  the  Government's  power  to  have  a 
General  Election  as  and  when  it  chooses.  If 
the  Government  is  defeated  in  the  Commons, 
it  is  prima  facie  a  sign,  not  that  Parliament 
should  be  re-elected,  but  that  the  Government 
should  be  reconstructed. 

*'  What,  then,  is  needed  ?  Simply  this  : 
that  a  Parliament,  elected  for  four  or  five  years 
— it  might  be  four  or  three — should  sit  for  its 
natural  term  unless  it  agrees  by  a  vote  that  it 
cannot  carry  on.  If  it  defeats  the  Government, 
but  does  not  want  a  General  Election  before 
its  time  is  up,  then,  if  the  Government  cannot 
honestly  give  way,  a  new  Government  should 
be  formed  that  will.  All  Governments  will 
resist  a  change  that  so  seriously  undermines 
their  power  over  Parliament.  All  Parliaments 
should,  therefore,  work  for  a  reform  that  will 
so  usefully  alter  the  balance  of  political  power. 

"  Having  gone  so  far,  we  must  go  farther. 


256  POLITICAL   PROFILES 

Another  dull  patch  in  the  lungs  of  democracy 
is  the  fact  that  as  things  are  Parliament  has  no 
real  control  over  taxation.  It  cannot  propose 
or  impose  a  new  tax,  which  is  as  well.  But 
neither  can  it  take  off  a  tax  without  bringing 
down  the  Government.  The  country,  or  the 
greater  part  of  it,  rocked  with  indignation 
when  the  Lords  threw  out  the  People's  Budget. 
Finance  was  the  concern  of  the  popularly 
elected  chamber  alone.  But  when  did  the 
Commons  throw  out  a  Budget  ?  When  is  it 
going  to  begin  to  exercise  real  control  over 
taxation  ?  And  if  neither  the  Commons  nor 
the  Lords  control,  what  is  our  system  of 
taxation  but  one  of  Executive  requisitions, 
tempered  by  the  right  of  the  Commons  to  throw 
everything  in  the  melting-pot,  including  the 
careers  of  its  Members,  by  defeating  the  Govern- 
ment and  bringing  about  a  General  Election  ?  "  ^ 
No,  it  is  not  true,  as  is  sometimes  said,  that 
the  main  interest  of  politics  in  the  future  will  be 
economic  rather  than  political.  For  there  is,  or 
should  be,  a  great  constitutional  struggle  ahead 
between  the  Executive  and  the  Commons — a 
struggle  in  which  this  time  the  House  of  Lords 
may  take  part  on  the  same  side  as  the  Commons. 

*  Scrutator  in  the  Sunday  Times, 


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